Ambulance services are under unprecedented strain due to increasing demand, coupled with capacity issues resulting from a workforce crisis and lengthy delays in hand-overs at A&E (Alarilla et al., 2022). Many patients are also facing difficulty in obtaining a GP appointment, with lengthy waits and a propensity for telephone consultations in place of face-to-face appointments (Campbell, 2023). As a result, evidence suggests that ambulance services are dealing with an increased number of non-emergency calls, requiring on-scene assessment and referral rather than time-critical intervention (Eaton et al., 2018). The NHS ‘long term plan’ (NHS, 2019) advocates community based care to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions, yet difficulties in obtaining suitable and timely GP appointments may result in increased ambulance call outs, providing vital face-to-face assessment, reassurance and management of long-term conditions traditionally treated by GPs. There is a body of evidence that poor access to GP services increases the propensity for patients to attend A&E (O’Cathain et al., 2022; Giebel et al., 2019), but there is a lack of evidence of the impact on demand for an ambulance response. This study utilises YAS callout data, alongside indicators of access to GP services, to explore and quantify the link between poor provision of primary care and non-urgent ambulance call outs. Subject to data availability, it may also link those call outs to patients’ individual records of GP appointments to explore the impact of appointment mode and wait time on ambulance call out rates. With demand for unplanned or urgent care increasing (NAO, 2023), this study is timely and could offer new evidence on the importance of investing in accessible and appropriate primary care services to minimise unnecessary demand on emergency healthcare.
24/09/2024
1 year
