Perceptions of healthcare professionals and managers regarding the effectiveness of GP-led walk-in centres in the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to identify the perceptions of healthcare professionals regarding the effectiveness and the impact of a new general practitioner-led (GP-led) walk-in centre in the UK. SETTING: This qualitative study was conducted in a large city in the North of England. In the past few years, there has been particular concern about an increase in the use of emergency department (ED) services provided by the National Health Service and part of the rationale for introducing the new GP-led walk-in centres has been to stem this increase. The five institutes included in the study were EDs, a minor injuries unit, a primary care trust, a GP-led walk-in centre and GP surgeries. PARTICIPANTS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with healthcare providers at an adult ED, an ED at a children's hospital, a minor injuries unit, a GP-led walk-in centre, GPs from surrounding surgeries and GPs. RESULTS: 11 healthcare professionals and managers were interviewed. Seven key themes were identified within the data: the clinical model of the GP-led walk-in centre; public awareness of the services; appropriate use of the centre; the impact of the centre on other services; demand for healthcare services; choice and confusion and mixed views (positive and negative) of the walk-in services. There were discrepancies between the managers and healthcare professionals regarding the usefulness of the GP-led walk-in centre in the current urgent care system. CONCLUSIONS: Participants did not notice declines in the demand for EDs after the GP-led walk-in centre. Most of the healthcare professionals believed that the GP-led walk-in centre duplicated existing healthcare services. There is a need to have a better communication system between the GP-led walk-in centres and other healthcare providers to have an integrated system of urgent care delivery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.038 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".