Our Services

The visiting hours are 10.00AM to 7:00pm, Monday to Friday. St Helens GP’s are able to submit a request to the Acute Visiting Service (AVS) for an urgent visit that they are unable to make themselves and which could otherwise result in a hospital admission. The Practice Receptionist will take all the relevant details and pass them through to the Practice Doctor. The Doctor will make a clinical decision as to the urgency of the call, the needs of the patient and whether they can and should visit the patient personally. This is crucial, given that the practice has access to the patient’s history and can make an accurate assessment of needs. Having received the initial information from the surgery, the AVS GP will be informed of the need to visit the patient; will assess the necessary background clinical information and the nature of the current problem. Subject to current capacity the AVS GP can then visit the patient and determine what actions need to be taken.

Criteria

The GP Visiting Scheme is for patients who:

• are 60 years of age or older,
• have urgent care needs but do not need to go to hospital so long as they can be visited by a GP within 1 hour, and the patient’s own GP is unable out carry out an urgent home visit, or
• have already been assessed/visited by their GP, who knows that without close medical supervision and follow-up, the patient may end up being admitted to hospital when they could be more appropriately managed at home.

This Service makes available extra children’s consultations and takes the pressure off their own surgery during peak periods. This also helps to avoid children attending the local A&E department when they cannot get an appointment at their own surgery.

The Children’s Service offers overflow appointments for Member Surgeries when all their appointments have been fully booked. The service normally operates as part of the Winter Pressure, Mon-Fri 13.00-19.00. The surgery staff will ring Rota and book a children’s appointment for the same day at Albion Street Clinic. Once the appointment has been arranged with Rota the surgery will pass the time of the appointment to the Parent/Guardian.

The Single Point of Access service is operated by St Helens Rota. This is primarily to facilitate GP admissions to the Acute Hospital to either the Medical Assessment Ward or to the Surgical Admissions Ward.

The request is made by either the patient’s own GP, the AVS doctor, the Children’s Clinic doctor or the Out of Hours doctor. Upon receipt of an SPA request St Helens Rota will contact the hospital to arrange the admission and if necessary contact the Ambulance service to arrange transport.

The St Helens Rota Call Handler will offer the referring GP a number of alternatives to admission if appropriate eg IV at home service, Clinical Connection Point Nurses (CCP), Walk in Centre DVT Service, Rapid Response service etc.

St Helens Rota provide a GP out of hours service to the population of St Helens and part of Prescot.

This service operates Monday to Friday from 6.30 pm until 7.00am the following morning plus all weekend to 7.00am on Monday morning. During these hours patients should phone their own surgery number and they will be automatically transferred to St Helens Rota.

Depending on the circumstances, the patient will be offered an appointment at either Albion St Clinic or at our satellite clinic at Taylors pharmacy in Haydock, a home visit or advice from the doctor over the telephone.

Details of all consultations are transmitted to the patient’s own surgery immediately.

St Helens Rota has a fully operational Call Handling Centre. We provide call handling services to a number of clients including District Nursing, Emergency Dental services, Single Point of Access Services, and GP Practices.

We are happy to discuss new customer’s requirements. Please contact Steve Holbrook, Director of Operations, using the contact form on our website.