A REVOLUTIONARY new medical centre is to open its doors in East Lancashire - and allow hard-pressed family doctors to sleep easily!

The development of a Primary Care Emergency Centre will mean hundreds of people in the Ribble Valley will not be able to call out their own GP during the night or at weekends.

Instead they will have to travel to the centre, based at Clitheroe Community Hospital, if they urgently need a doctor.

The radical change in the service is designed to cut the spiralling out-of-hours workload of GPs who often have to get up in the middle of the night.

Doctors in Clitheroe and Whalley have stressed that the emergency centre, which will open on April 15, will not act as a hospital casualty department.

But they have pledged that they will make home visits to patients who find it impossible to travel to the emergency centre. These will include the terminally ill and housebound.

The centre will be located in the outpatients' department of the hospital and will be open between 6.30pm and 8am from Monday to Friday and from noon on Saturday until 8am on Monday.

It will be staffed by specially trained nurses and GPs and has already received the backing of patient watchdog group, Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Community Health Council.

The centre will deal specifically with emergencies which need immediate attention and not problems which could wait to the following day.

Doctors have pledged that all "eventualities" will be covered and nobody will be refused medical care.

Leaflets explaining how the centre will operate are being delivered to homes across the Ribble Valley.

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