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Table 1 Features of general practitioner (GP) cooperatives in the Netherlands [2, 5, 34]

From: Contacts with out-of-hours primary care for nonurgent problems: patients’ beliefs or deficiencies in healthcare?

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