Medical Centre

It is often assumed that providing easier access to community-based general practice during evenings and weekends can reduce demand for emergency and other unscheduled care services, promoting more appropriate care and reducing the costs associated with expensive hospital-based treatment. For example, in England’s NHS there is political pressure to expand general practice surgeries’ opening hours to progress towards a ‘seven-day NHS’. When considering extension of primary care opening hours in England, it is useful to compare primary care access across other countries in the European Union. Despite differences in healthcare commissioning and funding, European countries face comparable challenges such as ageing populations and increases in chronic conditions and mental health problems, all of particular relevance to primary care.  In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , we examined England’s current in-hours general practice services relative to tho...

A study published in the journal BMJ Quality and Safety concluded that extending GP opening hours will not ease the rising burden on Accident and Emergency departments. The observational study was led by Imperial College London. Lead author Dr Thomas Cowling from Imperial College's Department of Primary Care and Public Health and colleagues compared patients' experiences of GP surgeries with the number of Accident and Emergency visits in their areas in England from 2011-2012 to 2013-2014. They examined reports from NHS England's annual GP Patient Survey, and included patients registered to 8,124 GP surgeries. We measured levels of patient satisfaction using three factors: the ease of making an appointment, opening hours, and overall experience. They then matched these responses with A&E departments in their area to observe any correlation with the number of visits to A&E. Overall, areas where patients were happier with the ease of making appointments, which coul...

Hospital administrative data, such as those provided by the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database in England, are increasingly being used for research and quality improvement. To date, no study has tried to quantify and examine trends in the use of HES for research purposes. We therefore examined trends in the use of HES data for research. Our study was published in the Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics . Publications generated from the use of HES data were extracted from PubMed and analysed. Publications from 1996 to 2014 were then examined further in the Science Citation Index (SCI) of the Thompson Scientific Institute for Science Information (Web of Science) for details of research specialty area. 520 studies, categorised into 44 specialty areas, were extracted from PubMed. The review showed an increase in publications over the 18-year period with an average of 27 publications per year, however with the majority of outputs observed in the latter part of the study p...