Overwhelmed NHS line failing for hundreds of worried callers

Health leader warns that people ‘fed up’ with waiting for help from phone line might visit A&E or GP instead

THE NHS’s urgent advice line is buckling under the strain of the coronavirus crisis, with fears that hundreds of people are not getting through to their first port of call for advice.

Large numbers of callers to NHS 111 are understood to be giving up after failing to get a reply, as the service struggles to cope with overwhelming demand from those worried they may have contracted the deadly virus.

There are also reports that even after getting through to trained call handlers, some people are having to wait hours and even days for clinicians to call them back with instructions on what to do next.

An IT project worker with the Army who returned from Italy with a fever said he waited four days to hear back from NHS 111 clinicians. Other users have complained of receiving conflicting and contradictory advice.

Waiting times of 90 minutes to get through to call handlers have been reported and the number of calls abandoned by patients unable to get through has reportedly leapt.

Dr Simon Abrams, chairman of Urgent Health UK, the federation of social enterprise healthcare providers, reported that around a quarter of calls are being abandoned by patients who fail to get through to an operator within 30 seconds.

Official figures show that only around three per cent were abandoned in January, before the start of the coronavirus crisis.

NHS England was unable to confirm the figure but said that “all calls are being responded to”.

At an Urgent Health UK meeting on Thursday, a number of out-of-hours leaders said that abandonment rates had increased “substantially”.

Dr Abrahams said: “People were quoting figures of 25 per cent of calls being abandoned [after 30 seconds], the implication being that there’s an awful lot of extra telephone traffic to

‘If you can’t get through to 111 – the service that’s meant to be there to provide you with the right guidance – then where do you go?’

Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or your sleeve – not with your hands – when you cough or sneeze

Put used tissues in the bin immediately

Wash your hands with soap and water often – use hand sanitiser gel if soap and water are not available

Try to avoid close contact with people who are unwell

Do not touch your eyes, nose or mouth if your hands are not clean 111. They’re ringing and then getting fed up with waiting phone to be answered.”

He said that raised the prospect that large numbers of people unable to get through to NHS 111 might visit their local GP or A&E unit instead, risking the further spread of the virus.

“If you can’t get through to 111 – the service that’s meant to be there to provide you with the right guidance – then where do you go? You can go to A&E or you can go to your GP, both of which are not appropriate for suspected cases. If 111 is the service we’re meant to be encouraging people to use in this situation, then there needs to be the capacity for it to handle that volume of calls,” he told Pulse magazine.

Dr Ivan Benett, a Manchester GP and a non-executive director at the Central Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, said he had to wait for an hour before getting the advice he needed after returning from Venice.

“Many would have not bothered holding on. Staff were all very polite.

“Surely at times of predictable high volume there should be more people on the phones,” he wrote on Twitter.

Reena Verma, a computer engineer from London, complained of having to wait five days for clinicians from NHS 111 to come back to her, after she reported that her flatmate returned from Venice with a high temperature and flu symptoms. “If my flatmate has coronavirus, I need to know now,” she said.

Dean Hall, who works on IT projects involving the British Army said he waited four days for a clinician to call him after he contacted NHS 111 on Tuesday [February 25] with a cough after returning from northern Italy.

A spokesperson for NHS England said that “all calls are being responded to”, with extra demand being rerouted to another region.

They said: “Anyone with concerns about coronavirus can call NHS 111. [In] addition the NHS is recruiting more call handlers to support those already working around the clock.”

At the height of the Cold War the Soviet Union employed thousands of military scientists working in dozens of clandestine military sites across Russia to develop, manufacture and stockpile biological weapons.

The Sverdlovsk facility was tasked to develop anthrax warheads for intercontinental ballistic missiles. On March 30 1979 something went wrong. Anthrax was released from the covert establishment resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands falling ill – mostly innocent workers from a neighbouring ceramic plant. Party officials, including Boris Yeltsin, were quick to implement emergency protocols controlling the news and producing a plausible explanation – the deaths were blamed on a batch of contaminated meat from the local butchers. Two decades later, with the Cold War over, Russia finally admitted the truth. A terrible accident caused by poorly replaced filters allowing the pathogen to escape into the air.

Today of course it is illegal to procure biological or toxin weapons thanks to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Two hundred countries have signed the treaty including Russia, China and Iran, but there is no authority to conduct inspections and no official verification process.

Today the world is threatened by another pathogen: Covid-19. It would be irresponsible to suggest the source of this outbreak was an error in a Chinese military biological weapons programme. But as chairman of the defence select committee it is my job to understand the threats (current and emerging) facing the UK and scrutinise the Government’s responding defence posture.

I would like to know more about the Chinese Army’s Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, coincidently