GP-led services getting back to normal across Shropshire

Health and care bosses said more services continue to be reopened at the delivery levels prior to the start of the outbreak.

In order to care for residents, including those diagnosed with the virus, swift changes were made to some services to ensure safe care could be offered to those for who needed it.

Changes were made for reasons including staff needing to be redeployed, staff absence due to sickness or the need to shield, the need to move equipment to support patients with coronavirus and the need to take over some spaces and buildings to deliver care allowing for social distancing.

Dr Jane Povey, Sustainability Transformation Partnership Clinical Lead said: “When the number of cases of the virus started to increase we had to make some decisions about which services we could continue to deliver. Patient safety was the most important factor in making those decisions and none of the services affected put at risk any patients with more serious conditions or needs.

More Covid-19 coverage:

• See the latest coronavirus stories from Shropshire, Mid Wales and beyond

• Coronavirus: Latest number of deaths and confirmed cases in Shropshire, Telford and Mid Wales

• Star Neighbours - how you can give and get help locally

“For the last few weeks we have been restoring some of these services. We still need to be mindful of social distancing and be in a position to treat people in the event of outbreaks and an increase in cases. It is a complex process and we need to consider when we restore a service what are the impacts elsewhere in care, such as an increase in delivering and analysing blood tests and X-rays.”

Some services were dropped, some continued with reduced hours while others moved to managing more patients via online and phone technology rather than face to face.

For some services that only affected a small number of known patients staff were able to make contact directly and therefore changes would not have been visible to the public. While others such as those affecting GP practices were more obvious.

Dr Povey added: “GPs have made great progress over the past few months in delivering remote total triage and online consultations – and we want to encourage some of these changes to continue. While some services are being restored to how they were before the outbreak we can’t switch them all back on straight away and we hope people can understand the reasons why and bear with us.”

More health and care services will continue to be restored over the coming weeks. Where the changes affect only a limited number of known patients they will be contacted directly by the service. Where the service is available to all patients and the public, changes will be communicated through websites, newsletters, posters and leaflets, social media and local newspapers and radio stations.