NHS North Central London 111 / Out of Hours Procurement

Background

NHS 111 is a free telephone number that helps people with urgent but not life-threatening conditions to access the most appropriate service to help them or receive self-care advice. It is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

GP out of hours (OOH) services are available so that people can still access primary care, for urgent problems, when their GP surgery is closed at night or over the weekend. GPs and other clinicians are on hand to offer advice and face-to-face appointments if needed.

Doctors in north central London (Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington) are working together to improve our local NHS 111 and GP out of hours services. This includes looking at integrating the two services so they work better together.

There is duplication in the current system. For example, patients needing help from the GP out of hours service are usually assessed at least twice, by NHS 111 and by the GP out of hours service itself. It would be better for patients if the two services were more closely linked.

Our research shows that patients are not always close to their home or their nearest out of hours base when they call 111, but are often somewhere else in north central London. We think that makes it the right size of area to join these services together.

The contracts for both the current NHS 111 and Out of Hours services have been extended to allow for this procurement to take place which means we have a real opportunity to learn from experience and make NHS 111 and GP OOH services work better for patients.