D Doc Urgent GP out of hour’s service copes well during busy holiday period.

D Doc, like all other health services, saw a surge in activity over the holiday season. During this peak period from Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day the service received over 3000 calls. Over 80,000 call were received by the service in 2014.
Dr Mel Bates Medical Director for D doc said “Christmas and New Years are the most challenging time of the service. We had over 100 individual GPs on duty during this time and they saw over 2500 patients. 70% of the GPs on duty were local north Dublin GPs with the remainder sessions filled by our regular sessional GPs.
Our five centres were extremely busy, especially at Swords, Coolock and Hartstown, but with the help HSE D Doc staff; Receptionists, nurses, and drivers, we managed to provide a safe and good service for patients. Average waiting times from appointments to consultation time were good with 87% seen within 45 minutes and the figure for those seen in less than one hour is 96%.The average waiting time was 27 minutes.home-image
The appointments based system we use means that people can wait in their own homes rather than waiting rooms until their appointment time, and while they could wait up to 4 hours for a routine appointment, we would schedule more urgent cases to be see more quickly.
At lot of planning goes into this achieving this performance. We work with the HSE management and Clinical Nurse Managers as far back as September and of course we have to recruit the local doctors to make themselves available during the holiday period.
We expect levels of activity to remain high over the next two months and would advise people to plan to see their own GP in the first instance before considering D Doc. This way the service will be better available for those people needing urgent GP care during the coming winter months.”