Pregnancy related telephone consultations to an out-of-hours provider: a retrospective database study

Abstract

There is a marked increase in the number of General Practitioner (GP) organisations across Europe providing out of hours (OOH) emergency primary care services whereby GPs and/or Nurse Practitioners (NPs), provide telephone consultations to patients (Giesen et al., 2007a, McKinstry et al., 2009, Derkx et al., 2009). This has been an important development to manage the rising demand for health care with increasingly scarce resources (Blank et al., 2012, Purc-Stephenson and Thrasher, 2010) and also reduces unnecessary attendance at accident and emergency departments or home visits by GPs (Bunn et al., 2005, Roberts et al., 2008)... In this study we describe the characteristics of telephone consultation calls made by pregnant women to an OOH service run by a GP co-operative and also to compare and contrast the differences between the way the calls were handled by GPs and Nurse Practitioners (NPs). The NPs were qualified and registered nurses experienced in primary care or emergency care settings and none were practicing.