Morrison said ministers should have learned lessons from a similar scheme introduced in England nearly 20 years ago which, he said, had failed to relieve pressure on other NHS services.<\/p>\n
Many of those walk-in centres were subsequently either shut down or repurposed into other services such as emergency care centres.<\/p>\n
He said studies of the English scheme found that 20% of people who used the services would not have sought medical help if the centres had not existed, which suggested they had increased demand on finite NHS resources.<\/p>\n
The medic accepted that low take-up might in part be due to the new centres not being well publicised but even if that were fixed, he said there were still problems.<\/p>\n
He explained: “There’s limitations on the people they will agree to see, they are not open to the whole of the community, some of them only act within certain GP clusters or are available to a certain number of GP practices locally whereas the vast majority of the people of Scotland have no access at all to these walk-in centres.”<\/p>\n
His concerns were echoed by Glasgow GP Dr Victoria Shotton, who said there were more cost-effective ways of improving services. <\/p>\n
“They don’t cover chronic diseases or the things that really matter, the ongoing health issues that patients have and struggle to get seen,” she told the programme. <\/p>\n
She said that there were already alternative services such as the Pharmacy First scheme which offer on-the-day treatment for things like infections.<\/p>\n
“This is a very expensive service which has been set up without consultation,” she said. <\/p>\n
“The amount of money we are spending per head to see patients like this, when they can be seen far cheaper in practices already set up and their community pharmacist.”<\/p>\n
Dr Chris Provan, Scotland chair at the Royal College of General Practitioners, was also critical of the first results. He said: “Today’s figures reinforce our long-held view that GP walk-in centres will not meaningfully increase the capacity of general practice to meet the needs of the population.<\/p>\n
“These centres offer a narrower range of services than those available through core GP practices, replicate services already provided through initiatives such as Pharmacy First and operate at significantly higher cost.”<\/p>\n
He called for a “robust and transparent evaluation” of the programme once all the pilot sites have concluded. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Morrison said ministers should have learned lessons from a similar scheme introduced in England nearly 20 years ago…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-563493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}