Out of hours service

Access to a doctor or nurse if you have an urgent medical condition

 

Contact freephone number 0300 3300 804

The Out of Hours Service provides urgent medical and health care for patients in the East Riding during the period when doctor’s surgeries are closed (6pm to 8am on weekdays and all day during weekends and bank holidays). 

Care is delivered by doctors (experienced general practitioners) and community nurses who have a wealth of experience working in this area.  There are also First Contact Practitioners who are highly skilled and experienced advanced nurse practitioners, and who have undertaken additional training in order to provide high quality care in the out of hours period.

You should contact the Out of Hours service if you feel that your condition is urgent and that you cannot wait to be seen and treated by your own doctor during normal hours. You should contact the dedicated freephone number for Out of Hours 0300 3300 804 and you will be put through to experienced trained advisers who will ask for your name, address and details of the medical condition. This conversation is used to assess the urgency of your medical condition.  Your call will be prioritised and then forwarded to either a doctor or nurse for assessment. Following this, a doctor or nurse will call you back and you may be asked to attend a community hospital or healthcare centre for further assessment and possible treatment.

You may receive a home visit if it is deemed necessary.  Please note that home visits are undertaken in exceptional circumstances and patients are expected to attend a primary care centre if they are able to.  This ensures that patients are seen more quickly and that home visits are reserved for seriously ill and housebound patients.

Please note, telephone calls are recorded for legal purposes. To ensure that your records are complete, details of out of hours consultations are kept by us, passed to the practice and retained in your own medical records.

The National Quality Requirements for Out of Hours require that your call should be returned within set timescales:
Urgent: within 20 minutes
Routine: within 60 minutes

Following the telephone contact with a clinician if it is decided that you need to be seen the timescales are as follows:
Urgent: within 2 hours
Routine: within 6 hours