After-school GP appointments more effective than seven-day access, study suggests

A study led by researchers from Imperial College London has found that getting more practices to offer after-school appointments would ‘cut unnecessary A&E visits’ more effectively than a seven-day access.

The team of GP’s calculated that when early evening appointments were available, children were nine per cent less likely to visit A&E compared to those who were unable to access appointments between 5:00-7:00 PM.

The report claimed that even making a small improvement in the number of appointments available during this time could help reduce A&E visits significantly. Currently, the study found that 85 per cent of all attempts to secure a GP appointment were successful, however, improving access further could prevent 33,000 visits to emergency departments by children a year.

It also added that it would make more sense for the government to fund more after-school GP appointments than the ‘blanket’ approach of extending GP practice hours.

The report’s lead author Dr Sonia Saxena, a public health researcher at Imperial College London and a GP in West London, said: “Use of emergency departments for problems that could be dealt with in primary care is an inefficient use of the service, and could detract resources from more seriously ill children. Our study was not a trial, which means that we don’t know whether difficulty accessing GPs is the cause of increased emergency department usage, or whether there is some other explanation for the link. 

"However, given recent debates surrounding GP opening hours, our results suggest that additional resources to provide GP appointments for children when they need it - for instance after school rather than at weekends - may be a better investment for the NHS than blanket proposals to increase access hours.”

Professor Azeem Majeed, a co-author of the study from Imperial’s School of Public Health, and also a practising GP, added: “With nearly half of the NHS budget currently spent on acute and emergency care, spending is becoming unsustainable, so our results point to an important way in which some of the burden on hospitals could be alleviated.”