Star date: 7th October 2016

TERMINAL CANCER SUFFERER WAITS SIX HOURS FOR EMERGENCY DOCTOR

76 year old Reg Howard, of Swinton, waited six hours for an emergency doctor to call last Saturday after ringing the Out of Hours Service while coughing up blood and feeling acute pain. When the doctor finally arrived, he told Reg that he was the only doctor covering 15 surgeries. The Salford Star estimates that the city has one doctor on emergency call out per 80,000 people. 

The Out of Hours GP service is run by Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and is commissioned by Salford CCG whose latest patient survey notes that 27% of Salford people said the Out of Hours care service `took too long'.

Full details here...

Last Saturday afternoon, terminal cancer patient, Reg Howard, felt more than unwell at his Swinton home...

"I was feeling bad in the morning and as the day wore on I got progressively worse, the pain kicked in and it was quite horrendous, I was coughing up quite a lot of blood" he recalls "So I rang my Macmillan nurse who advised me to ring the 111 number and they put me through to the emergency doctors. They said that they would get someone here. That was at 2:13pm, because my phone logged it.

"I waited and waited, and the pain got worse, my morphine wasn't kicking in properly and I couldn't move" he adds "Eventually I rang through again and they said `He's definitely coming' and he finally arrived at 8:20pm in the evening, after I'd gone through all that pain in the day.

"When he came I asked him why it had taken so long" says 76 year old Reg "He apologised and told me `There's 15 surgeries that I'm responsible for, and I'm the only one on duty...'"

Salford has 43 GP practices covering 242,000 people which would mean there is only one Out of Hours emergency doctor for around 80,000 people.

The Out of Hours service is run by Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, which is commissioned via a £1.667million contract with Salford Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to provide the Out of Hours service.

In the latest GP Patient Survey (July), carried out by Ipsos MORI for NHS Salford CCG, `All those who tried to contact an NHS service when GP surgery closed in
past 6 months' were asked how they felt about the speed of which they `received care or advice'.

While the survey question covers both advice received on the phone and actual Out of Hours call-outs, 27% of the sample of 634 people stated that `it took too long'...

"It's a stupid situation and obviously financial" says Reg "I've got a terminal illness, and while I was in a lot of pain and coughing up blood, I know I'm going to die. And if I'd died on Saturday that would be the end of it anyway. But I feel sorry for a lot of other people who have other kinds of pain, who have to wait for such a long time..."

*The Salford Star has contacted Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust asking it to confirm that there was only one doctor on call on Saturday 1st October covering the patients of 15 surgeries in Salford; to confirm how many residents that would include; whether the occurrence was unusual or whether it is pretty standard cover for a Saturday; and how many doctors in total covered the Salford area on out of hours emergency cover last Saturday.

Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust has not responded as yet...