Home Visit Guidelines
Home visits are only for patients who cannot attend the surgery.
Necessary Visits
A doctor will always visit the following patients:
- Terminally ill patients
- House-bound patients – These are patients for whom attending surgery would have an effect on their health or cause severe discomfort.
Emergencies
If you believe a patient is seriously ill and needs an urgent visit, a doctor will call you back to assess whether the patient can wait for the doctor to visit or if an emergency ambulance needs to be called.
Examples of these situations are: chest pain, shortness of breath, severe bleeding.
Unnecessary Visits
In most cases a GPs visit is not required, especially if the patient can be brought to surgery. The following do not usually require a home visit.
Children
Children with the following symptoms are usually strong enough to travel to surgery by car: Fever (It is not necessarily harmful to take a child with a fever outside), coughs and colds, earache, headache, vomiting and diarrhoea, abdominal pain (in most cases).
Children experiencing these symptoms may not be fit to travel by bus or to walk, but car transport may be available from friends, relatives or by taxi. If a child is fit enough to come to surgery, we ask that you make every effort to bring them.
Adults
Adults who experience the symptoms mentioned above, as well as back pain, are usually able to come to surgery by car.
Elderly
Common problems in the elderly such as poor mobility, joint pain and general malaise are usually treated in surgery, although patients who are truly housebound can be visited.