UK wide same day, urgent and emergency care service map
This project is a UK-wide multi-informant service mapping exercise to identify and characterise same day, urgent care and emergency care services and the workforce providing and supporting them.
The objectives are to:
- Populate a ‘service mapping database’ with information about same day and urgent care services across the UK
- Develop a comprehensive service map: Identify and categorise same day and urgent care services across the UK, capturing variation in service models, workforce composition, and operational structures.
- Conduct deep dives into selected services: Investigate 8-10 services in detail through document analysis and interviews with system and service leaders and frontline staff to explore workforce organisation, challenges, and sustainability.
The mapping of services will involve analysis of publicly available documents and other data sets to explore how same day urgent and emergency care services are organised across the UK.
This information will be used to populate the service mapping database. We will gather information from a range of sources across the UK including: 42 Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in England, 7 Health Boards in Wales, 14 NHS Boards in Scotland, 6 Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland and 14 UK Ambulance Services. We will contact key informants to clarify discrepancies or provide supplementary information on service configuration.
During this process, we will conduct ‘deep dives’ with 8-10 selected services of interest. These will be determined by factors including innovative models of delivery, high performing same day and urgent care services or high staff satisfaction and retention levels.
Deep dives will involve interviews with service leaders, members of the workforce and patients/carers. Interviews will investigate the organisation of the workforce, service drivers, workforce challenges, sustainability and leadership.
The service map data will be interrogated to address a range of research questions on the organisation and delivery of same day, urgent and emergency care service in the UK. This study will run until August 2026 as part of the wider SURGE partnership.
