With Urgent Care services easing pressure on A&E departments, it is important to continue pursuing efficiency and allocating capacity within Urgent Care.
Providing digital healthcare can form a pivotal route to ensuring patients can get help urgently, without having to go to hospital.
Not every person who visits an urgent treatment centre (UTC) requires face-to-face assistance. When this is the case, digital appointments can reduce the pressure on these centres, while allowing more time for those that need immediate physical attention in a UTC.
If a face-to-face appointment is required, patients can still be referred to the right specialist in the right setting.
How is Livi supporting Urgent Care?
Livi helps support UTCs to manage the influx of patients presenting with primary care symptoms, during the time of year when facilities are feeling the most pressure. These might be patients attending UTCs physically, or ones that have called 111 and need to be treated by a GP on the same day.
Patients that call 111 are either triaged by the clinical team at a UTC as ‘appropriate for a video consultation with a Livi GP’, or the 111 call handlers follow the local Directory of Services to manually book in the patient with a Livi clinician.
Patients do not have to download an app to use this service – the video appointment happens through the web browser on their phone. There are also tablets available in UTCs for patients to speak to a GP whilst on the premises, but without using UTC clinician time. We are already rolling out our services across Sussex, Humberside and Derbyshire, amongst other regions, and we remain committed supporting more areas that struggle to find extra capacity locally, or are experiencing particularly high demand with the latest variant outbreak.
Did you know, Livi’s Urgent Care provision can...
- Reduce the need for patients to see their GP the next day
- Reduce A&E visits when a video GP consultation suffices in relation to the requirements of the condition
- Reduce wait times in UTCs
- Reduce the number of referrals from 111 to GP practices
- Allow UTCs to concentrate on patients that need to be urgently treated face-to-face
- Keep patients who might have Covid out of physical settings
If you would like more information on our Urgent Care offering, please contact partnerships-uk@livi.co.uk.
