2.3. Home visits: duty clinicians and collaboration with other practices
For some practices, a cost-effective solution could be a doctor dedicated, for example, to providing home visits or telephone consultations. This may be preferable to doctors both running regular surgeries and carrying out home visits. This can be taken forward by collaborating with other nearby practices.
Benefits
- Where there is a dedicated duty doctor to make home visits, emergency patients can be seen more quickly than they would at the surgery. And they can benefit from longer appointments.
- Practices can reduce the number of emergency walk-in patients. These cause congestion in the waiting room and extend doctors’ working hours.
- By reducing visits to the surgery, home visits can also cut the risk of infection and local hospital admissions.
Drawbacks
- Home visits can cost time and money if the practice doesn’t have a dedicated duty doctor for home visits. A GP can see between two and four patients at the surgery in the time it takes to visit one patient at home.
- Better care can often be provided at the surgery. This is because there is specialist equipment and tests can be carried out more easily than at home.
- Home visits can be very disruptive for surgeries. This can lead to dissatisfaction among those patients making practice appointments, but subsequently kept waiting because of an emergency home visit.
Costs
It can be expensive for practices to carry out home visits, because they take much longer than appointments at the surgery. Practices who have combined to provide an acute visiting service have found the service pays for itself (see above).
Large practices might think about making one of their doctors available every day for home visits. This does not add any extra cost, and is popular with patients and doctors.
