7 ways we’ll make your hospital hotlines loved

Published: 15th October 2021
Why does moving local specialty hotlines to Consultant Connect centralise the whole Advice & Guidance process making things much easier for clinicians, consultants, and commissioners?
6 ways to make unloved hospital hotlines loved - Consultant Connect

Moving local hotline arrangements such as ‘on-call’ or ‘hot-week’ consultant lines to Consultant Connect brings everything in one place, centralising the whole Advice & Guidance process, benefiting all parties involved. Given that Advice & Guidance helps avoid unnecessary hospital referrals – hotlines are an important method of managing demand for stretched hospitals and protecting secondary care.

There are at least 7 important gains to consider and we also make the process of integration super easy….

1. There’s no risk of not being able to capture activity for EROC – the new Elective Recovery Outpatient Collection (EROC) codes have already been built into our data to remove any potential admin burden for the systems we work with (read our recent blog article).

2. All the specialties can be accessed through calling one SINGLE number – the main reason Primary Care clinicians don’t use hotlines is that they often don’t know which specialties offer hotlines and they lose track of all the different phone numbers.

3. The Consultant Connect App acts as a highly useful directory listing all specialties available along with their opening times and detail of whether the responding clinician will be a local or out-of-area NHS consultant.

4. Volumes of calls are tracked – giving ICBs/Health Boards, ICSs, Hospitals/Trusts an accurate record of Advice & Guidance activity from Primary Care.

5. All calls are recorded for medico-legal purposes – meaning your hotlines are automatically GDPR-compliant. Calls also can be accessed upon request and saved to patient records. Many of our customers use call recordings to inform training requirements and strategic decisions.

6. Calls to Consultant Connect get answered – because Consultant Connect utilises the availability of groups of specialty consultants, rather than individuals, calling clinicians have a better chance of getting through. If you need extra resource for answering calls, you could consider using the National Consultant Network.

7. Consultant Connect doesn’t go out of date – unlike directories, you simply dial Consultant Connect and choose your specialty, no chance of the number being out of service.

 

If you have any questions or would like to find out how we can action this for your area, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01865 261 467 or email hello@consultantconnect.org.uk

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