Twelve practices will open on Saturday mornings from December.
Twelve GP practices across Calder and the valley will open on Saturday mornings from the first weekend of December, offering pre-bookable appointments between 8.30am and 12.30pm. The scheme, agreed between the regional health board and the local medical committee, will add an estimated 2,800 appointments a month and is intended to ease pressure on weekday surgeries and on the emergency department at St Columba’s Hospital.
The participating practices are spread across the region, with five in the city, three in the valley, two in Harrow and two in Port Selwyn. Patients registered at any practice in the same local network will be able to book a Saturday slot at the nearest open surgery, even if their own does not take part.
Who will be seeing patients
Each Saturday session will be staffed by at least one GP, a practice nurse and a receptionist, with some surgeries also offering appointments with pharmacists and physiotherapists. Most appointments will be for routine problems, reviews of long-term conditions such as asthma and diabetes, blood pressure checks and repeat prescriptions that need a clinician’s sign-off. Urgent cases will still be directed to the out-of-hours service. Practices will share patient records through the existing local network system, so a doctor at a neighbouring surgery will be able to see a patient’s history and current medication before the appointment begins.
Doctors will be paid at a sessional rate from a regional access fund, and the health board said no GP would be required to work Saturdays. In practice, about forty doctors have volunteered for the rota, many of them part-time partners who will swap a weekday session for a weekend one.
“Patients have been telling us for years that they cannot get time off work to see a doctor on a Tuesday afternoon. This is not a cure for every pressure on general practice, but it gives a lot of people an option they simply did not have,” said Dr Ruth Abernethy, chair of the local medical committee and a partner at the Canal Street practice.
Where the pressure comes from
Figures published by the health board in October showed that the average wait for a non-urgent GP appointment in the region had risen to 16 days, from 11 two years ago. Practices in the fastest-growing parts of the city, including new housing estates along the eastern ring road, reported waits of more than three weeks. At the same time, around one in six patients attending the emergency department on Mondays said they had tried and failed to see a GP over the weekend.
Health board officials believe Saturday opening could reduce the Monday spike in hospital attendance, although they acknowledged that the evidence from similar schemes elsewhere has been mixed. A similar pilot in the valley two years ago found that most Saturday slots were used by working-age adults and parents of young children, groups who often struggle to attend during the week.
Patients’ groups broadly welcomed the announcement. Olusegun Hartley, who chairs the patient participation group at a surgery in Harrow, said members had been asking for weekend access for years. “The test will be whether people actually hear about it,” he said. “If the slots go unfilled because nobody knows they exist, it will be quietly dropped.”
How to book
Saturday appointments can be booked through each practice’s usual phone line or online system from Monday 24 November. Receptionists will offer a Saturday slot to anyone who cannot attend a weekday appointment. The health board will review usage at the end of March and decide whether to add more practices, or extend opening to Saturday afternoons, from the spring.
Some GPs have voiced caution. A small number of practices declined to take part, citing staff shortages and concerns that weekend work would make recruitment harder. The medical committee said it would monitor the effect on doctors’ workloads and would not ask practices to extend hours further without additional funding.
