An urgent care need is an illness or injury that requires urgent attention, but isn’t a life threatening situation. The ‘front door’ to urgent care services is calling NHS 111. We’ll assess your needs and get to you the best possible care.

Integrated urgent care, or IUC, is about getting you the right advice, at the right time, in the right healthcare setting. IUC is about joining up all parts of the healthcare system to ensure that when you need help, you experience the most seamless journey possible. By connecting the system, we can help reduce pressure on ambulance services, and accident and emergency departments. We can do this by ensuring that patients’ needs are addressed as early on in the journey as possible, without the need for an ambulance to be called, or a long wait at A&E.

When you call 111, you’ll speak to one of our health advisors who will ask you a series of questions about your symptoms. These will help us give you the right advice or direct you to the right person to help you. Your call might be transferred through to our Clinical Assessment Service so you can speak to an experienced clinician. If we can’t resolve your concerns over the telephone we might book you a face-to-face appointment or a home visit.

Once your symptoms have been assessed, if our team thinks you need to be visited in your own home then we will arrange that for you. Patients can’t directly book a visit with the home visiting service, it’s based on clinical need.

Within our services we employ advanced nurses, paramedics, and urgent care practitioners. Using a range of clinicians within our services means that we can help you be seen by the best clinician for your healthcare needs. In the past, the out-of-hours doctor's service has been solely focused on GPs delivering the service. However, in-hours and out-of-hours care has transformed to include other clinicians who are highly competent at delivering primary care. The national shortage of GPs is well-known, so the service is having to transform to make sure that we make the best use of the GPs that we have. GPs lead our service so there’s always senior clinical advice available to support our clinicians.