The new freephone service for urgent care advice, known as NHS 111, which will take over from NHS Direct, had its ‘soft’ launch last week. And not everything went according to plan.
The board meeting of the outgoing Wiltshire Primary Care Trust (PCT) was told (February 27) that there were an unacceptable number of dropped calls – calls which are not answered before the patient hangs up. And there were cases of over-anxious members of the NHS 111 staff calling out ambulances unnecessarily – for example for someone with a sore throat.
Staff at the PCT monitoring the service understand that there are bound to be teething problems in a new 24/7 service. NHS 111 will not take over fully from NHS Direct for some weeks. However, the service had “a credibility gap that needs to be closed quickly.”
As Marlborough News Online has reported, Harmoni HS Ltd is contracted to run the service for Wiltshire for five years from 2013. Harmoni, which has contracts to run the service in eleven other areas of England, was bought by Care UK for a reported £48m – after Harmoni signed the Wiltshire contract.
The decision to scrap NHS Direct and replace it with the cheaper NHS 111 service was one of the coalition government’s first decisions in its plans for the NHS. Although the effectiveness of NHS 111 will impact directly on budgets held by Wiltshire’s new Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), from April 1 the contract with Harmoni will be the responsibility of the NHS Commissioning Board.
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