Heidi Smith

Heidi Smith is the Operations Manager for Care UK’s out-of-hours service in Southend.

On a Monday, my day starts at 8.45am after I’ve dropped the kids at school and I arrive at the office.

The first task of the day is to check my emails and catch up with what has been going on over the weekend – the primary care centre is operational 24 hours a day over the weekend – so there is usually quite a lot to catch up on! I check-in with the weekend receptionist at the primary care centre who fills me in on how busy the centre has been and whether there are any issues I need to deal with. This weekend it turns out there was a problem with the automatic double doors at the primary care centre not opening properly! It takes me a while to find the right person to speak to – but I eventually get this resolved.

On most days I make a visit to the local Essex Ambulance Station where I meet with the manager. We deliver the out-of-hours service in partnership with Essex Ambulance who do the call handling and provide vehicles and drivers for any home visits. Therefore it is important that we catch up on a regular basis to go over paperwork such as the rotas and any problems reported by the drivers. Putting together the rotas takes quite a while – with 25 GPs and reception staff to rota into shifts each month it gets quite complicated! We also check the drug store and place the weekly drug order.

Throughout the day my mobile is constantly ringing, much of the time it is one of our GP’s who could be calling for a variety of reasons such as wanting to check or change their hours; they may have some feedback about a patient that needs following up; or they often want to request a specific medication that they want us to stock.

When I get back to the office I put together a stats report which shows how many patients have been seen, how many were home visits and so on. I send this report through to the Primary Care Trust and Care UK head office each week. The Primary Care Trust commission the service and have overall responsibility for the patients so they need to be kept up to date on how the service is going.

 Find out more about Care UK’s primary care services.