The Health Board will be taking over the responsibility for Out of Hours GP calls from 6pm on Wednesday the 14th of November 2007.
I'm sorry about the short notice of this, but I only had confirmation of this myself a few hours ago. This was due to a legal dispute over our contract with the Health Board.
The Health Board initially will provide locums to cover the practice in the evenings and weekends and says it will have a more permanent solution in place by February next year. I don't know what that solution will be as the Health Board have not told me what the options are that they are looking at (the last time I heard from them they had three remaining options they were looking at, down from an original list of 8 options).
In the mean time, patients should continue to call the surgery if they require urgent assistance day or night. Between 6pm and 8am the phones will either divert directly to NHS 24, or an answering machine message will tell you what number to call to speak to NHS 24 and/or the doctor on call.
Sadly, one option that the Health Board has already rejected was our offer to continue to provide 24/7 cover from Strachur with a mixture of the current doctors and locums. You can download a copy of the business plan that I submitted here to read more about the plan.
There is a community council meeting on the 28th of November at which the Health Board and I will make presentations regarding the Out of Hours and I hope as many people as possible will attend.
