Please ring for home visits between 7.45am and 11.00am, if possible, so that the doctor will be able to see you on his rounds and not have to make a special journey. These visits will normally be with your own GP however if you ring after 11.00am the duty doctor will be the one who visits.

All home visit requests after 11am will be dealt with by the on-call duty doctor.

Our staff are happy to give home care when appropriate. Most ill patients and their carers prefer care to take place in the home rather than in hospital.

The team is dedicated to providing the best possible standard of care at home but seeing the patient at home rather than at the surgery has a lot of disadvantages. Facilities at home can never be as good as at the surgery and travelling takes up a lot of time which the doctor would rather spend seeing patients in surgery.

For these reasons the doctors have asked staff to book home visits only when the patient is too ill to come to the surgery.

 

Home Visiting Guidelines

These are our home visiting guidelines, which have been compiled with guidance from the Leicestershire LMC (Local Medical Committee).

Visit recommended

We believe home visiting makes clinical sense and is the best way of giving a medical opinion in cases involving:-

• the terminally ill

• the truly housebound for whom travel to the surgery by car would cause a deterioration in their medical condition or unacceptable discomfort.

 Visit may be useful

After an initial assessment over the telephone a seriously ill patient may be helped by a GP’s attendance.  However the GP may advise the patient, or person with the patient, to ring 999 to receive the appropriate immediate care.

Examples of such situations are:-

• heart attack

• severe shortness of breath

• severe heamorrhage

 
Visit is not usual
 
In most of the following cases, to visit would not be an appropriate use of a GP’s time:-
 

• common symptoms of childhood (fevers, cold, cough, earache, headache, diarrhoea/vomiting and most cases of abdominal pain). These patients are usually well enough to travel by car. It is not necessarily harmful to take a child with a fever outside. These children may not be fit to travel by 'bus or to walk, but car transport may be available from friends, relatives or taxi firms.

It is not a doctor's responsibility to arrange such transport.

• adults with common problems (such as cough, sore throat, influenza, back pain and abdominal pain) are also readily transportable by car to a doctor's premises.
   

• common problems in the elderly (such as mobility problems, joint pain and general malaise) would also best be treated by consultation at a doctor's premises.