"Your call is very important to us, please hold"

We’ve already heard about the problems in the East and West Midlands with the new 111 non-emergency service. Here are some extracts from ‘This is Somerset’.

It looks like the Western Daily Press was onto this back in February as Wiltshire and Somerset were given the dubious honour of trialling the new service.

NHS hired private firm Harmoni to run the service, but soon ran into trouble, with ambulance crews and their bosses complaining that they were being sent to people with minor complaints.

Now an anonymous whistleblower working for Harmoni in North Somerset, said the area was understaffed by medical professionals like doctors and nurses. The whistleblower said locum doctors from Europe, and across Britain are performing back-to-back shifts round-the-clock and foreign doctors with a poor grasp of English have been used to plug gaps in the rota. The whistleblower said working for Harmoni was like “taking a loaded gun and sitting with it because at some point it’s going to become so unsafe it’s going to go off”.

“My personal feeling is that at times it has been unsafe,” the source said.

The service was supposed to launch at the start of April in Wiltshire, Bath and North East Somerset, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, but doctors have postponed that and are keeping Harmoni’s performance ‘under constant review’.

Yesterday, the front page story in the ‘Daily Mail’, revealed that nationally, so far, the average population covered by one Nurse on the 111 scheme is 250,000.

The ‘Daily Telegraph’, getting in on the act had the following story by Nick Collins;

 The number of people who hung up after waiting for more than 30 seconds increased from 6,976 in February to 29,100 in March, according to NHS England figures. And the average call length also increased from 14.19 minutes in February to almost 18 minutes in March.

However, it should also be noted that the number of calls to the line increased by more than half a million between the same timeframe.

But given as a percentage, the proportion of people hanging up after initially dialling the number increased from 3.2 per cent in February to 8.1 per cent in March, figures show.

Last week, leading doctors warned that the "problematic" roll- out of the NHS 111 advice line has left patients not knowing where to turn to for help.

 

The Royal College of General Practitioners said patients have "lost confidence" in the new non-emergency number before it is even fully up and running across the country.

So, NHS England saved money by shutting down NHS Direct – a service which was well staffed, well run and well respected by patients.

They replaced it with a service manned by call centre staff using a computer script, with a Nurse or a Doctor, moonlighting and half asleep, somewhere in the background.

How much did that save?

How much has this fiasco cost?

The result?

Patients aren’t ringing or they are hanging up because they’ve waited too long  - they ring the ambulance or struggle in to A and E instead.

Conveniently, it is going to provide the hospital managers up and down the country with a ready made excuse all year, to explain why they keep missing the four hour target for dealing with emergencies at A and E.

I know, the solution will be that the government will remove the four hour target. That should sort everything out, nicely and cheaply.

Neil Harris

(a don’t stop till you drop production)

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