Local Care Direct has won the contract to provide call handling and clinical assessment for 168,000 patients in North East Lincolnshire when doctors’ surgeries are closed.
The new services, which start on 1st October, will also cover 9,500 patients living in the North Thoresby area.
The service represents a vital element of the co-ordinated health advice, care and treatment services available to local patients during evenings, night time and Bank Holidays. In addition to undertaking clinical assessments and providing advice over the phone, Local Care Direct will also have the ability to directly refer to the out of hours service in Grimsby should a local clinical assessment or home visit be deemed appropriate.
The contract was put out to tender by the former North East Lincolnshire PCT in February 2007 and attracted bids from a number of national providers. Local Care Direct was selected after detailed assessment of its bid and its ability to deliver a high quality service.
As part of the selection process, a delegation from the then North East Lincolnshire PCT also visited LCD’s operational and administrative headquarters at Bradley, near Huddersfield, to assess its systems of work and clinical governance framework.
Calls to Local Care Direct will be handled at its Bradley operations centre where clinically trained staff will assess what is needed and then pass the details via a dedicated technical link to the Primary Care Centre at the Diana Princess of Wales Hospital in Grimsby where any face to face consultation with a GP will be provided locally.
Commenting on the decision to award the contract to Local Care Direct, Jane Lewington, Chief Executive at North East Lincolnshire Care Trust Plus, said:
“Local Care Direct has an excellent track record of success in the provision of services of this nature and this was reflected in the quality of the bid submitted. It is vital that the services available to patients out of routine service hours are provided in a co-ordinated, timely and effective manner and I am confident that Local Care Direct has the experience, capacity and skills to achieve this.”
Emma Wilson, LCD Chief Executive said: “We are very pleased to have been chosen to provide this service. We are looking forward to working closely with our commissioning partners and other service providers to ensure that the people of North East Lincolnshire – and those in North Thoresby – receive the best possible standard of care.”
About Local Care Direct
Established in July 2004, Local Care Direct was formed by the amalgamation of seven predecessor organisations, some of which had been providing out of hours primary care for over 20 years.
It is now one of the country’s largest social enterprises in health, providing out of hospital care to 2.5 million patients in West and South Yorkshire.
The organisation has an annual turnover of £17.5 m and has a dedicated team of more than 1,000 clinical and non-clinical staff.
As a social enterprise, Local Care Direct works for community benefit, as represented by its members. These are drawn from communities throughout the areas it serves and are
encouraged to play a part in helping LCD and its partners to shape the future of local health care by raising issues and identifying potential improvement opportunities. Engaging with communities is, therefore, fundamental to the ethos of the organisation.
