ABSTRACT
A deputising service is a commercial organisation which contracts to provide out-of-hours care on behalf of general practitioners. The care is delivered by doctors employed by the service who are qualified and accredited for or have exceptional experience of primary care. Deputising services have been expanding their repertoire of responses to requests for care and also provide telephone advice, either from doctors or nurses, or out-of-hours centres which patients may attend for care. An understanding of patient satisfaction with out-of-hours care is limited, first, by the use of poorly characterised satisfaction instruments and, second, by the lack of comparative data. Doctors who work for deputising services are perceived to ‘overprescribe’. Descriptive studies suggest that deputising doctors prescribe to between 65 and 70% of patients who request care and practice doctors to between 30 and 35% of patients. Indicators of the quality of hospital referrals show few differences in the performance of deputising and practice doctors.
