About NDUC
Established more than 10 years ago, NDUC is a leading out of hours care provider, serving patients across Northumberland, Newcastle, North and South Tyneside.
Outside of normal GP surgery hours, patient calls are answered by trained call operators at NDUC's Longbenton call centre. In most cases, they will arrange for a GP to call you back. If your call is clinically urgent this will be within minutes, but other calls may take slightly longer.
The GP will discuss your symptoms with you and decide on further action if required. In practice, this might mean a face-to-face consultation at one of NDUC's seven urgent care centres, a home visit by a doctor or by providing advice over the telephone.
Ambitions
Staffed by a 350-strong team of local GPs (97 per cent of GPs are local) and nurses, NDUC is a not-for-profit organisation and has ambitious plans for the future, in North East England and beyond. These plans include the expansion of its services and business model across the country, diversifying further into other areas of clinical and social care, and developing 24-hour GP services.
Performance
NDUC operates a highly efficient, reliable out of hours service and consistently meets and exceeds the National Out of Hours Quality Requirements set out by the Government.
The organisation currently answers more than 164,000 calls and holds over 91,000 face-to-face patient assessments per annum. NDUC's performance during 2006 is outlined below:
| Target | Standard required | NDUC's performance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Call answering | 90 secs | 95% | 99% |
| Call back from a doctor for urgent cases | 20 mins | 95% | 98.29% |
| Call back from a doctor for routine cases | 60 mins | 95% | 99.62% |
| Urgent home visits | 2 hours | 95% | 97.39% |
| Routine home visits | 6 hours | 95% | 98.51% |
| Urgent centre visits | 2 hours | 95% | 100% |
| Routine centre visits | 6 hours | 95% | 99.89% |
- During 2006, callers accessing NDUC's out of hours service would, on average, receive a call back from a member of the clinical team within 5 minutes if their call was urgent
- If a home visit was required then, on average, it would take a further 53 minutes for a doctor to visit if the call was urgent and a further 105 minutes if the call was non-urgent
- Government standards require that home visits should take place within two hours for urgent cases and six hours for non-urgent calls, but patients served by NDUC are, on average, receiving urgent home visits within an hour and non-urgent home visits within two hours
- NDUC saw a 10 per cent increase in calls at the start of 2007 compared to the same time the year before, demonstrating that people find the service useful and have faith in how NDUC can help them
- NDUC achieved its ISO 9001 in 2006, demonstrating that quality and consistency can be achieved within a fixed budget by hard work and staff dedication
- A recent patient satisfaction survey revealed that more than 95 per cent of service users thought NDUC's services were 'good' or 'excellent'
