New Urgent Primary Care Centres will help to reduce pressures on GPs and Emergency Department
8 June 2022
Three new Urgent Primary Care Centres (UPCC) will be located across Gwynedd and Anglesey to help reduce pressures on GPs and Ysbyty Gwynedd’s Emergency Department.
The Health Board has been successful in obtaining Welsh Government funding to provide the service that will replicate the UPCC already established in Wrexham & Flintshire.
The initiative will deliver three primary care centres at Ysbyty Alltwen, Ysbyty Penrhos Stanley and within the outpatients department at Ysbyty Gwynedd.
The project will target on the day urgent primary care presentations, creating capacity to support GP surgeries and reducing unnecessary Emergency Department attendances.
Dr Nia Hughes, GP and Arfon Cluster Lead said: “The UPCC’s will support GP surgeries by providing additional capacity to help assess and treat patients with acute medical problems, on the day.
“Patients with certain medical symptoms may be given an appointment with a clinician at the UPCC. This will then help release capacity for the GPs to deal with patients with more complex or chronic medical problems.
“Hopefully, this will help us somewhat with the huge demand for primary care services that we are trying to deal with currently.”
The service will operate Monday to Friday between 9am – 6pm, further details on opening times and location the UPCC will be operating from on certain days can be found here. Outside of these hours, the existing GP Out of Hours service will continue to support patients who do not require emergency care.
Patients who attend the Emergency Department will be assessed and a referral will be made to the UPCC if appropriate.
Eleri Evans, Head of Nursing for Emergency Care at Ysbyty Gwynedd, said: “We are very excited to be working on this project with our colleagues within Primary Care.
“In time patients will be able to manage their conditions in a more appropriate way by attending the right place and be seen by the right service at the right time.
“We are looking forward to working with the primary care team in order to develop the service together.”
This service does not offer a drop-in clinic, patients will need to contact their GP surgery in the first instance who will then make an assessment whether they are suitable for a referral to the UPCC.