Three decades of care and commitment.

The problem was simple, and specific: how to provide safe, local, after-hours cover in one of the most rural and diverse regions of England.

In late 1995, a handful of Cumbrian GPs signed the papers for a new cooperative, rooted in a simple commitment: that no patient should go without care when their surgery was closed. Three months later, it had a name: CueDoc. Four months after that, it had a service running from Whitehaven to Penrith, covering 6:30pm to 8am on weekdays plus every weekend and bank holiday.

By the late 2000s, CueDoc was woven into the fabric of its communities, covering 56 North Cumbria surgeries, with roughly 150 doctors and 80 other staff on the rota. Ron Fearon retired in 2007 after twelve years at the helm, passing the reins to Managing Director Susan Blakemore, who later went on to become Chief Executive.

An important structural change came in autumn 2008. The cooperative was renamed Cumbria Health on Call, or CHoC, and for the first time became a truly county-wide out-of-hours provider.

The merger with Baycall brought South Cumbria and the Morecambe Bay area under one roof, two organisations becoming one team under the new CHoC banner, serving the whole county together. Dr Stephen McQuillan and other South Cumbrian directors joined the board on 1 April 2009.

What followed was a decade defined by a relentless pursuit of excellence. The Social Enterprise Mark in 2014 formally recognised its not-for-profit status. An employee-led Social Enterprise Committee, established in 2016, has since funded more than seventy community causes from the Great North Air Ambulance to Eden Valley Hospice.

In 2017 CHoC became the first out-of-hours provider to be rated as Outstanding by the Care Quality Commission. This was followed in July 2018, by the team collecting the NHS70 Parliamentary Award for Excellence in Primary Care at the Palace of Westminster, after being named Northern regional champion from more than 750 entries.

• 2009 Baycall merger — South Cumbria joins the cooperative.
• 2014 Social Enterprise Mark awarded.
• 2017 CQC Outstanding — the first out-of-hours provider in England.
• 2018 NHS70 Parliamentary Award for Excellence in Primary Care.

The decade tested the organisation like no other, through the Beast from the East, county-wide flooding, and a global pandemic. Through each, CHoC listened, adapted, and kept care running when it mattered most.

COVID-19, in particular, turned CHoC into a remote-monitoring pioneer, keeping patients at the heart of every decision, even when they couldn't walk through the door. In living rooms and farmhouses across the county, patients took their own blood pressure, their own oxygen saturation, their own ECGs, with clinicians watching and monitoring remotely. Telemedicine links first piloted around 2016/17, with the tool going on to be used for various services including oncology, mental health, school nursing and paediatric nephrology.

The same decade saw CHoC become a safety net for rural general practice, stepping in where surgeries struggled to recruit. The contracts and services that followed, from extended access primary care, asylum-seeker clinics, agricultural health checks, services aimed at reducing health inequalities across the county, turned an organisation built for evenings and weekends into something quite different.

By 2024 the organisation had outgrown its name, but not its roots. The "on Call" was dropped to reflect the expansion into daytime primary, community and dental care, while the founding mission held firm.

"The logo is one flowing line, representing our joined-up and consistent service in a simple and clear image, with a nod to our original red C."

Headquarters and call-handling operations moved from Hilltop Heights to Wavell Drive, a new home built for an organisation still growing, still adapting. Months later, in September 2024, the Carlisle Urgent Dental Access Centre opened at the new site, commissioned by the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board.