GWENT’S GP out-of-hours service will be scaled back at one of the area’s hospitals from the end of this month, subject to health board approval.

The proposal is to close the service at the primary care centre at Nevill Hall Hospital, Abergavenny, from midnight-8am, Monday-Thursday.

The board of Aneurin Bevan University Health Board will be asked today to approve it.

It follows a public consultation programme, which in turn followed a six-week trial of a midnight-8am closure of the centre at the hospital last autumn.

The health board wants to improve its GP out-of-hours service at its busiest times - weekends and Bank Holidays.

These are currently the periods proving most difficult to staff sufficiently, and it is believed that a closure of the Nevill Hall out-of-hours centre on four weekdays will help concentrate scarce resources at the busiest times.

There have been concerns raised too by senior health board managers, about out-of-hours response times during the service’s busiest periods.

The GP out-of-hours service in Gwent has approximately 100,000 contacts a year, or close to 2,000 a week, and the majority are on Saturdays and Sundays.

Increased pay rates, including incentives for staffing the more ‘fragile’ or difficult to man shifts, have been introduced, but staffing difficulties continue, and this has, according to a health report, “often resulted in a need to close the base at Nevill Hall Hospital and redirect patients on an ad hoc basis.”

The Nevill Hall centre sees one or two people a night during the week, and is the quietest of Gwent’s three out-of-hours centres, the other two being based at St Woolos Hospital in Newport, and Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr in Ystrad Mynach.

During last autumn’s trial closure, all but 20 of the 202 patients from north Gwent who contacted the service in that period were offered advice over the telephone.

Of the 20 requiring to be seen, four were visited at home, and the remainder were given appointments at the other centres.

There were no major concerns about the proposal highlighted during the public consultation process.

Subject to approval, the Nevill Hall centre is set to close as proposed from the week beginning Monday May 30. It would only be opened Monday-Thursday, midnight-8am thereafter, in exceptional circumstances.