Description of the service
SELDOC has 460 GP members from over 125 practices, covering a patient population of around 900,000 people across three South East London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham and deals with around 59,622 calls per annum.
SELDOC operates a 24-hour answering service and provides a duty doctor service between 6:30pm and 8:00am weekdays and 24-hours on weekends and bank holidays.
Patients initially contact Seldoc by telephone. Call handlers record the patients’ details and a brief description of their symptoms, and then pass the call to the next available duty doctor. The duty doctor then telephones the patient and discusses the problem.
Over 60% of calls conclude as telephone advice. Should a face-to-face consultation be required, the patient will be invited to attend one of hour primary care centres at Dulwich Hospital or at the primary care suite at Lewisham Hospital.
If the patient is unable to attend, then a mobile doctor will be sent to visit them in their home, chauffeur driven by qualified/ trained drivers in comfortable cars. Roughly one in five calls result in a fact to face consultations at a PCC with a similar number resulting in home visits.
SELDOC is able to customize its service to accommodate those GP’s who wish to carry out some of their own on-call responsibilities. In these cases Seldoc will take the patients details in the usual way, but will pass the information to the patients own GP.
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