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Emergency Care

There seems to be an obvious correlation between the out-of-hours doctors service and people going to A and E when they could perhaps have been treated elsewhere. Also, I believe that NHS Direct is a very good scheme but, when I used it myself, I found there to be quite a time lag between making the initial call and a nurse ringing me back, followed by a doctor ringing me back and telling me to go to an A and E department. That covered a time span of five hours. If I had not had a little medical training, which gave me the confidence to know what the problem was, I might have become nervous and whipped my husband off to A and E a lot earlier. Does my hon. Friend think that there is a problem of people going off to A and E of their own accord as a result of that time lag?