[Organization of Norwegian out-of-hours primary health care services].

BACKGROUND

The organization of out-of-hours primary health care services in Norway is currently changing from municipal-based to larger inter-municipal co-operations with regular employees and improved competence. The Norwegian Medical Association and others have encouraged the establishment of larger out-of-hours primary health care units that include all municipalities and regular GPs and serve the entire population. More data are needed to study the situation for out-of-hours services in Norway.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

The National Centre for Emergency Primary Health Care sent questionnaires to all 433 municipalities in Norway the autumn of 2005 to study how the out-of-hours primary health services are organized.

RESULTS

Out-of-hours primary health services is an inter-municipality endeavour in two-thirds of Norwegian municipalities and one third of the remaining municipalities have plans to start such co-operation. Regular GPs participate in out-of-hours services to a varying degree. In half of the municipalities all regular GPs participate in out-of-hours duty. Participation decreases with increasing numbers of inhabitants and regular GPs in the municalities. We found a distinct variation in the number of phone calls per inhabitant to municipal out-of-hours services. Due to geographical factors, there are also variations in patient transport time and availability of ambulances to the out-of-hours offices.

INTERPRETATION

We observed distinct variations in the organization of the out-of-hours emergency primary health services in Norway. Some of these differences are due to differences in population density and geographical factors.