ArticleBMJ open2018
Who attends out-of-hours general practice appointments? Analysis of a patient cohort accessing new out-of-hours units.
Article in BMJ open, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Telephone triage in urgent unscheduled primary care in 16 European countries: a cross-national questionnaire-based expert study.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2026Article
- Did a national extended access scheme translate to improvements in patient experience to GP services in England? A retrospective observational study using patient-level data from the English GP patient survey.BMC health services research · 2025Observational
- Patients' Use of e-Consultations as an Alternative to Other General Practitioner Services: Cross-Sectional Survey Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Parent's preferences for unscheduled paediatric healthcare: A discrete choice experiment.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2023Article
- Experiences of pain and pain management in advanced disease and serious illness for people from South Asian communities in Leeds and Bradford: a qualitative interview study.BMC palliative care · 2023Article
- Pre- and post-home visit behaviors after using after-hours house call (AHHC) medical services: a questionnaire-based survey in Tokyo, Japan.BMC emergency medicine · 2021Article
- Experiences of out-of-hours task-shifting from GPs: a systematic review of qualitative studies.BJGP open · 2021Article
- Possible associations between callers' degree-of-worry and their socioeconomic status when contacting out-of-hours services: a prospective cohort study.BMC emergency medicine · 2021Article
- Protocol for a mixed methods exploratory investigation into the role and contribution of the healthcare assistant in out-of-hours palliative care.BMC nursing · 2021Article
- Advanced Access scheduling in general practice and use of primary care: a Danish population-based matched cohort study.BJGP open · 2020Article
- Undergraduate exposure to patient presentations on the acute medical placement: a prospective study in a London teaching hospital.BMJ open · 2020Article
- Article
- Examining differences in out-of-hours primary care use in Belgium and the Netherlands: a cross-sectional study.European journal of public health · 2019Observational
- Investigation of the demand for a 7-day (extended access) primary care service: an observational study from pilot schemes in England.BMJ open · 2019Observational
- No such thing as bad publicity? A quantitative content analysis of print media representations of primary care out-of-hours services.BMJ open · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesThis report describes the patients who used additional out-of-hours (OOH) appointments offered through a UK scheme intended to increase patient access to primary care by extending OOH provision.
designCohort study and survey data.
settingOOH appointments offered in four units in one region in England (October 2015 to November 2016).
methodsUnidentifiable data on all patients were abstracted from a bespoke appointment system and the responses to a patient opinion questionnaire about this service. Descriptive analysis of the appointment data was conducted. Multivariate analysis of the opinion survey data examined the characteristics of the patients who would have gone to the emergency department (ED) had the OOH appointments not been available.
resultsThere were 24 448 appointments for 19 701 different patients resulting in 29 629 service outcomes. Women dominated the uptake and patients from the poorest fifth of the population used nearly 40% of appointments. The patient survey found OOH appointments were extremely popular-93% selecting 'extremely likely' or 'likely' to recommend the service. Multivariate analysis of patient opinion survey data on whether ED would have been an alternative to the OOH service found that men, young children, people of Asian heritage and the most deprived were more likely to have gone to ED without this service.
conclusionsThe users of the OOH service were substantially different from in-hours service users with a large proportion of children under age 5, and the poor, which support the idea that there may be unmet need as the poor have the least flexible working conditions. These results demonstrate the need for equality impact assessment in planning service improvements associated with policy implementation. It suggests that OOH need to take account of patients expectations about convenience of appointments and how patients use services for urgent care needs.
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