Theme | Feature |
---|---|
General | Out-of-hours primary care has been provided by large-scale general practitioner (GP) cooperatives since the year 2000 |
Participation of 50–250 GPs per cooperative with a mean of 4 hours on call per week | |
About 120 GP cooperatives in the Netherlands | |
Population of 100,000 to 500,000 patients with an average care consumption of 250/1000 inhabitants per year | |
Out-of-hours defined as daily from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. holidays and the entire weekend | |
Patients are classified in urgency categories from high to low urgency (U1:1.5 % U2:11.1 % U3:38.0 % U4:21.7 % U5:26.3 %) | |
Per shift GPs have different roles: supervising telephone triage, doing centre consultations or home visits | |
Location | GP cooperative usually situated in or near a hospital |
Distance of patients to GP cooperative is 30 km at most | |
Accessibility | Access via a single regional telephone number, meaning the first contact mostly is with a triage nurse (only 5–10 % walk in without a call in advance) |
Telephone triage by nurses supervised by GPs: contacts are divided into telephone advice (40 %), centre consult (50 %), or GP home visit (10 %) | |
Facilities | Home visits are supported by trained drivers in identifiable fully equipped GP cars (e.g. oxygen, intra venous drip equipment, automated external defibrillator, medication for acute treatment) |
Information and communication technology (ICT) support including electronic patient files, online connection to the GP car, and sometimes connection with the electronic medical record in the GP daily practice |