In the run up to Christmas, NHS Direct introduced a range of measures to offer support to Ambulance Trusts, A&E departments and primary care services during their busiest time of year.
We encouraged primary care services and A&E departments to ensure their telephone messages included the option to call NHS Direct, and provided sample messages for them to use.
In addition, we contacted all Ambulance Trust chief executives to offer our help handling their low priority (Category C) calls. This would ensure that the 999 lines remained available for emergency calls.
As a result, three new regions of Category C call transfers were established with Ambulance Trusts, which together with the two existing regions, meant that over 2,600 Category C transfer calls were received by us over the Christmas and New Year period.
Cat C Ambulance Trust |
Calls transferred |
East of England |
529 |
Great Western Ambulance Service |
298 |
North West |
482 |
South Western Ambulance Service |
446 |
West Midlands |
882 |
Of these calls over 20% received self care or routine care, less than 8% were then identified as needing an ambulance, and over 9% (having spoken to us) identified that they did not want to proceed.
One Ambulance Trust identified that during a 24 hour period, this equated to 41 hours of blue light ambulance crew and vehicle time. This allowed the service to improve their response times to life threatening 999 calls over this traditionally busy period.
