Background: The organization of out-of-hours primary health care services in Norway is currently changing from municipal-based to larger inter-municipal co-operations with regular employees and improved competence. The Norwegian Medical Association and others have encouraged the establishment of larger out-of-hours primary health care units that include all municipalities and regular GPs and serve the entire population. More data are needed to study the situation for out-of-hours services in Norway.
Material and methods: The National Centre for Emergency Primary Health Care sent questionnaires to all 433 municipalities in Norway the autumn of 2005 to study how the out-of-hours primary health services are organized.
Results: Out-of-hours primary health services is an inter-municipality endeavour in two-thirds of Norwegian municipalities and one third of the remaining municipalities have plans to start such co-operation. Regular GPs participate in out-of-hours services to a varying degree. In half of the municipalities all regular GPs participate in out-of-hours duty. Participation decreases with increasing numbers of inhabitants and regular GPs in the municalities. We found a distinct variation in the number of phone calls per inhabitant to municipal out-of-hours services. Due to geographical factors, there are also variations in patient transport time and availability of ambulances to the out-of-hours offices.
Interpretation: We observed distinct variations in the organization of the out-of-hours emergency primary health services in Norway. Some of these differences are due to differences in population density and geographical factors.