Home Visits

GP HOME VISIT REQUESTS

• Will I be able to get a visit?

Group 1 – Am i completely bedbound and unable to move ?

Group 2 – Am i terminally ill or near to end of life ?

Group 3 – Am i so poorly i would come to harm if i were moved ?:

• When can i request a home visit

Please call the surgery on 642902 before 10am to request a home visit. You may receive a telephone appointment with GP in first instance to Triage

 

Reasons behind the need to rationalise home visiting:-

1. Quality of medical Care
2. A doctors ability to properly assess and to treat a patient seen in their own home is often impaired by the non ideal clinical situation of poor lighting, absence of chaperones, unhygienic conditions and such simple difficulties as soft beds, making it impossible to examine the patient properly
3. As technology moved on, sophisticated tests, treatments and equipment are being increasingly employed to improved care; much of this is not portable and thus not available on home visits
4. Speed of treatment is facilitated by restricting home visits to those who really need it. Others are to be encouraged to attend properly equipped medical facilities where patients are seen quickly and those that need it immediately
5. Workload. The workload of British GPs has increased greatly over the years and looks set to rise further and unless GPs are allowed to deliver care in the most efficient way possible the system seem likely to break down. If patients are seen at the surgery, rather than in their own home, then quite simply more patients can be attended to by a given number of clinicians.
6. Safety. Doctors & Nurses are particularly vulnerable to attack when home visiting
7. Financial. Paying highly trained and expensive GPs to spend much of their time driving themselves from house to house makes little sense

 

 

EXAMPLES OF VISITING GUIDELINES

1. Situations where GP home visit makes sense and provides the best way to give medical opinion
2. The terminally ill
3. The truly housebound – patient in whom travel to the surgery by car would cause a deterioration in medical condition or unacceptable discomfort

2. Situations where visiting it not usually required
3. Common symptoms of childhood fevers, cold, cough, earache, headache, Diarrhoea & Vomiting and most cases of abdominal pain. These patients are almost well enough to travel by car. The old wives tale that it is unwise to take a sick child out with a fever is blatantly unture.

IT IS NOT THE DOCTORS JOB TO ARRANGE TRANSPORT

1. Adults with common problems of cough/flu/back pain/abdominal pain are also readily transportable by car to the surgery
2. Common problems in the elderly, such as poor mobility, joint pain, general malaise would also be best treated by consultation at the surgery. The exception to this would be the truly bedbound patient