Making things easier for both primary and secondary care clinicians is essential especially given the current pandemic and the desire for the NHS to recover and reboot. 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, benefitting all parties involved:
1. All the specialties can be accessed through calling one SINGLE number – the main reason GPs 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.
2. The Consultant Connect App acts as a highly useful directory listing all specialities available along with their opening times and detail of whether the responding clinician will be a local or out-of-area NHS consultant.
3. Volumes of calls are tracked – giving CCGs/Health Boards and Hospitals/Trusts an accurate record of Advice & Guidance activity from primary care.
4. 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.
5. Calls to Consultant Connect get answered – because Consultant Connect utilises the availability of groups of specialty consultants, rather than individuals, calling GPs have a better chance of getting through. If you need extra resource for answering calls, you could consider using the National Consultant Network.
6. Consultant Connect doesn’t go out of date – unlike directories, you simply dial Consultant Connect and choose your specialty, no chance of the number being out of service. Given that Advice & Guidance helps avoid unnecessary hospital referrals– hotlines are an important method of managing demand for stretched hospitals and protecting secondary care if a second wave of COVID hits.
