Health chiefs offer reassurance over future of GP home visits in Sunderland

In November, a doctors’ conference in London voted to call on the government to consider scrapping the service, complaining it was no longer a viable option for many GPs.

But the demand has been criticised by care bosses in Sunderland, who said they were happy to see it continue, despite strains on finances.

“It’s always a controversial area but I don’t know any GPs who think they shouldn’t happen and we have a team in the community who do home visits already,” said Dr Ian Pattison, clinical chair of Sunderland Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

“Fundamentally, the GP link to home visits is still there and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

“I think this is about patients getting the best care they can from the best person and I don’t think my colleagues want to change that.”

He added: “GPs, when they have the time, like doing home visits because it gets us out of the surgery, but unfortunately it’s getting squeezed, but this is all subject to national contracts which we have little input into.”

Dr Pattison was speaking at a meeting of the CCG’s governing body on Tuesday, November 26.

A committee of doctors from Kent put forward a motion to remove home visits from GPs’ contracts at November’s Local Medical Committee (LMC) England Conference.

It claimed GPs don’t have ‘the capacity to offer home visits’ and said a new service should be set up for ‘urgent visits’.

Following the vote home visits were defended by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) , although patients were also urged to ‘consider very carefully whether they really need one’.

Professor Martin Marshall, the RCGP’s chairman, said: “Of course, home visits should be used wisely as they can be time consuming and take GPs away from our surgeries where we could be seeing more patients.

“But it is vital that patients who need the skills and expertise of a GP are able to access them if they are unable to make arrangements to get to their local surgery.”