Primary Care Services

Cumbria Health extended access service (CHEA) provides routine evening and weekend pre-bookable appointments with GPs, Nurse Practitioners, Nurses, health carer assistants and Pharmacists. The aim is to do as complete an episode of care as possible. Bookings are via 15 minute appointments with regular appropriate breaks. All clinicians must stay on shift until the end of the shift time, regardless of whether they have patients booked in or not. It is necessary for all clinicians working CHEA shifts to have “out of hours cover” for the shift by their indemnity organisation. This is necessary as there may well be a requirement for the clinician to deal with Cumbria Health (out of hours) patients. This could occur, for instance, if the CHEA clinic is not fully booked.

Digital Assessment Service (DAS) is a service that can be used across all Cumbria Health family practices by submitting an online consultation form found on your GP surgery website. Your request will then be assessed within the surgery and a remote telephone triage appointment made with a clinician if necessary. All routine requests are responded to within 3 working days.

Odyssey is a call handling system that is used to help non clinical staff assess the urgency of a patients request. This can allow patients access to the right treatment at the right time. Odyssey helps to avoid human error, not every member of staff speaking with the patient will be able to diagnose them from listening to their symptoms, the form does this for them.

Cumbria is the UK's third largest county in terms of area. It is home to the Lake District National Park, three Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and two UNESCO World Heritage sites. Cumbria hosts around 47 million tourists annually. The Tourist Health Line (THL) service has been set up to provide a telephone health helpline for tourists to the Grange and Lakes locality. The service operates from 9am to 5.30pm, Monday – Friday and offers access to primary care for people who don’t live permanently in the area.

All GP surgeries have a number of Protected Learning Time (PLT) days each year. Protected Learning Time is time set aside specifically for practice staff to undertake professional learning and personal development. As GP surgeries close early for PLT Cumbria Health provide cover during the time the surgeries are closed by extending our Out of Hours provision and responding to primary care health needs of people across Cumbria.