GP surgeries in Largs, Millport and West Kilbride will be continuing to prioritise urgent care - as the NHS faces ongoing significant pressures.

Practices are currently experiencing extremely high demand for services across the whole system.

Services across the whole health and care system remain under extreme pressure. 
It affects urgent and emergency care, primary care services, acute hospital services, as well as community and social care services.

This is due to a combination of staff absence across the system, high bed occupancy levels in our acute and community hospitals, and high levels of flu and covid in the community.

There is also a high volume of frail patients whose recovery includes complex care.

Claire Burden, Chief Executive – NHS Ayrshire & Arran, explains: “We are committed to providing safe and effective health and social care for our population in as timely a way as possible.

“However, services across the whole health and care system remain under extreme pressure.
“To address these issues, we have implemented a whole system response, where we are working with our partners to ease some of those pressures and improve services for people living in Ayrshire and Arran.

"We are working closely with partners across all emergency services, including our colleagues in the Scottish Ambulance Service and primary care, to anticipate and mitigate against delays wherever possible.

"Due to the overwhelming demand across general practice, and the need to prioritise same day emergency care to support the wider system, we are asking GP practices to move to only seeing urgent and emergency care patients only. 
"This ensures GP practices are able to prioritise urgent care, palliative care, screening programmes and out of hours services, as well as being able to provide care for those with more complex care needs."

Largs and Millport Weekly News:
 

Claire thanked all staff working across the whole system for their help and understanding in the extremely difficult circumstances.

She added: “If we all work together we can ensure that our services are there to look after those who need them most.”

Here are some simple things you can do to help support us over this busy period: Only visit your GP, out-of-hours GP services or ED if you really need to.

Visit www.nhsinform.scot for healthcare advice.

Go to your community pharmacy for advice. They can provide advice on a range of minor illnesses.

The NHS have also asked that all surgery users please remember to be kind to their staff.