GPs working within the emergency ambulance service
Funding
BNSSCG CCG Research Capability Funding (Local development)
What is the research question?
How do GPs working within the emergency ambulance service deliver outcomes of relevance to patients, providers, and the local health community?
What is the problem?
The increasing demand for urgent and emergency healthcare means services are continually evolving to match patients with the right services for their needs at the earliest point.
The boundaries between different parts of the urgent and emergency care system are increasingly indistinct – in some places by design, and in other places by virtue of the pressures on services, such that exactly where someone turns first to seek help can be shaped by factors not directly related to the clinical urgency of the problem.
Ambulance services are increasingly engaging GPs in various ways to help improve access to care, assist with the increasingly clinical complexity of patients requesting help from the service, and make the healthcare system more efficient.
What is the aim of the research?
To develop a detailed understanding of what happens when GPs work within ambulance service. Specifically, which sort of GP involvement provides the greatest benefit to individual patients and the wider urgent care system, and if they work well clinically and if they are cost-effective.
How will this be achieved?
Using a mixed methods realist evaluation approach to investigate the impact of GPs working in the ambulance service. This will include:
- Realist interviews with key stakeholders, patients/service-users, carers, advocates, clinicians, and external partners.
- Observation of how the GPs are working and how the workflow is affected by the GPs.
- A mixed-methods evaluation of patient and service outcomes, combining various data about the quality, safety, clinical effectiveness, and cost of care. This will use a combination of routine health service data and prospectively collected economic and clinical outcome data.
Who is leading the research?
Dr Matthew Booker, NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care, University of Bristol.
Further information:
For more information or to get involved in this project, please contact bnssg.research@nhs.net.