Out of Hours Services

Local Models of Care

This step requires that local models of care are developed and supported to enhance their capacity to meet out of hours demand in order to deliver services aimed at maintaining patients safely in the community. The intended outcome is that, when appropriate, patients appropriately access the out of hours service as a first point of advice and contact, and receive unscheduled care services outside of secondary care.

Out of Hours (OOH) Services

The aim is to support OOH Services in maximising safe care in the community:
  • Ensuring that Out of Hours services are compliant with the guidance set out in the Wales Quality and Monitoring Standards in the Delivery of Out-of-Hours Services
  • Apply relevant elements of the Primary Care Foundation’s Urgent Care, a practical guide to transforming same-day care in General Practice to Out Of Hours Services
  • Development of the generic filtering, signposting and appropriate triage model
  • Evolution of whole system Out Of Hours Service outcome & process measures.

Significant elements of the report, Urgent Care, a practical guide to transforming same-day care in General Practice, are also applicable to Out Of Hours Services. Progression to a generic filtering, signposting and appropriate triage model will reduce both variance in 999 requests and unnecessary clinical triage thus freeing up a significant quantity of senior clinical capacity.

This will require the development of whole system Out Of Hours Service outcome & process measures that are not counterintuitive and benchmark impact on the wider system.

There is no intention to encourage any Core Hours/Out of Hours divide. The extensive experiences of Wales Out Of Hours Service providers in protecting Acute Hospital Services from high volumes of clinical calls and their skills in filtering, triage and signposting are key resources to both the LHBs and the National Programmes.