7:00am Sunday 21st March 2010
By Jill Crooks
Doctors who run the county’s out of hours service say it will improve from April 1.
Wiltshire Medical Services (WMS), based in Chippenham, has been awarded the contract by NHS Wiltshire to run the out of hours service across the county.
WMS has been providing out of hours cover for the past five years in Kennet, North and West Wiltshire but from April it will cover the rest of the county. The service will have eight bases where doctors and nurses are either based or can meet patients who need urgent care.
These are at Trowbridge, Savernake, Chippenham, Salisbury and Shaftesbury hospitals and Amesbury Health Centre, as well as two new sites, Warminster Hospital and Great Western Hospital, Swindon.
WMS was set up by a group of Wiltshire GPs and doctors from other practices work shifts with the service. Founding directors of WMS include Dr Andrew Cowie of The Porch Surgery in Corsham and Dr Jamie Brosch of the Hathaway Surgery in Chippenham.
Dr Cowie said: “I believe the quality of service we will offer will be better because of the spread of the service.
“We don’t use any locum doctors. Our manpower is made up almost exclusively of local GPs who either live or work in Wiltshire.”
Concern was expressed at a meeting of Wiltshire Council’s health and adult social care select committee about the location of the bases for WMS doctors, including Devizes which does not have a base.
WMS did have a base at Devizes Hospital at weekends for about two years but this ceased when the wards closed two years ago.
Dr Cowie said Devizes had been considered as a base but said even when doctors were based at Devizes Hospital the number of patients seen was low.
He said: “Wiltshire is very challenging because of its rurality and there is simply not the resource to have a centre everywhere people would like.
“We appreciate that it means people in and around Devizes are having to travel but they have a choice of locations to go to in Chippenham, Trowbridge, Amesbury or Savernake, all of which are a little bit away but not huge distances.”
Savernake Hospital will continue to be a base on weekend days but not on weekday evenings, when demand is extremely low, but doctors could still meet patients there. Dr Cowie said: “People think there are doctors at Savernake all the time but there aren’t. We have spent a huge amount of effort trying to improve the service for the residents of Kennet as a whole.”
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