• Tobias Nieber, Elisabeth Holm Hansen, Gunnar Tschudi Bondevik, Steinar Hunskår, Jesper Blinkenberg, Janecke Thesen, and Erik Zakariassen.
• Nasjonalt kompetansesenter for legevaktmedisin, Kalfarveien 31, 5018 Bergen. tobias.nieber@isf.uib.no
• Tidsskr. Nor. Laegeforen. 2007 May 17;127(10):1335-8.

BackgroundThe 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 MethodsThe 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.ResultsOut-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.InterpretationWe 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.

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