Vocare House

Updated 8 December 2017

Vocare House provides out of hours general practitioner cover in the evenings, overnight, at weekends and on bank holidays. The service provides telephone contact and access to general practitioners at local centres and home visits. The service covers 954,000 patients throughout the Northumberland, Newcastle, and North Tyneside areas. Vocare House is part of a national organisation, Vocare Limited, which provides urgent care services to 10 million patients across the UK.

Patients can access the service from 6.30pm to 8am Monday to Friday and 24 hours throughout Saturday, Sunday and Bank Holidays. Calls to the service are handled by North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) via the 111 telephone number. Vocare House operates a triage model where all patients receive clinical telephone assessments. This prevents unnecessary journeys for patients and enables appropriate coordination of home visits and appointments according to clinical urgency and demand.

GPs from local practices provide the service. Patients can be seen in person by attending one of the service’s six locations:

• North Tyneside General Hospital, Rake Lane, North Shields, Tyne and Wear, NE29 8NH
• Hexham General Hospital, Corbridge Road, Hexham, NE46 1QJ
• Wansbeck Hospital, Woodhorn Lane, Ashington, Northumberland, NE63 9JJ
• Royal Victoria Infirmary, Queen Victoria Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear NE1 4LP
• Alnwick Infirmary, Infirmary Drive, Alnwick, Northumberland, NE66 2NS
• Berwick Infirmary, Infirmary Square, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, TD15 1LT

These locations are open until approximately 11.30pm seven days a week. After that time, patients may also have an appointment with a GP at the organisation’s headquarters; Vocare house, Balliol Business Park, Benton Lane, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE12 8EW. We visited Vocare House during this inspection.

There is a stable clinical staff team who work for Vocare House regularly. The service employs a number of both male and female GPs from the local community. The clinicians are supported by an administration / call handling team, receptionists, drivers and a management team who are responsible for the day to day running of the service.

Updated 8 December 2017

Letter from the Chief Inspector of General Practice

We carried out an announced comprehensive inspection at Vocare House on 10, 11, 14 and 30 January 2017. The overall rating for the service was requires improvement. The full comprehensive report on the January 2017 inspection can be found by selecting the ‘all reports’ link for Vocare House on our website at www.cqc.org.uk.

This inspection was an unannounced focused inspection carried out on 20 October 2017 to confirm that the service had carried out their plan to meet the legal requirements in relation to the breaches in regulations that we identified in our previous inspection in January 2017. This report covers our findings in relation to those requirements and also additional improvements made since our last inspection.

Overall the service is now rated as good.

Our key findings were as follows:

• The service’s internal online training system had been redesigned and the sample of training records we looked at showed all clinical staff had recently carried out safeguarding training.
• The staff responsible for recruitment had been integrated into the human resource support team. This team supported regional and line managers with the administrative tasks associated with recruitment. The sample of recruitment records we looked at showed references had been obtained.
• Most training had been completed. Arrangements were in place to contact GPs to request copies of training certificates where they had completed this externally to the service.
• A large amount of appraisals for non-clinical staff had been carried out over the previous six months; staff had either had a recent appraisal or had a date booked within the following two weeks.

At our previous inspection in January 2017 we said the service should continue to seek ways to improve performance on face-to-face consultations. Performance was below average; the target was for 95% of consultations to take place within set timescales. The provider had achieved between 73% and 100% for the period April to September 2016. Plans were in place to improve, which included employing prescribing pharmacists and setting up a national triage team to cover periods of high demand. At this inspection we found that performance had improved and ranged from 94.3% to 100% of consultations taking place within the relevant timescales.

Professor Steve Field CBE FRCP FFPH FRCGP 

Chief Inspector of General Practice