Home Visits - Practice Statement

Home visits are an integral and necessary part of general practice. However they are time consuming and often don't enable the best care or assessment to be delivered.

It is recognised by us that home visits are not a good use of valuable NHS resources unless circumstances are such that home visiting is unavoidable.

As GP workload escalates making best use of valuable GP and clinical time is our priority.

From both the patient and clinician perspective care is best delivered in an environment where there is access to full medical records, an optimum environment in which to examine the patient and the additional resources of the whole primary care team immediately to hand.

This in most situations is the GP surgery, so a good reason should be apparent for a visit to be deemed appropriate.

A patient can often be reviewed in a more timely fashion in surgery allowing quick assessment and hopefully preventing deterioration and enabling rapid intervention that may not be possible were a home visits was pending.

Telephone consultations are often used now to determine whether a patient needs to be seen face to face, so do not be surprised if this is offered with either a doctor or nurse.