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 clinicians and patients. Given that Advice & Guidance helps avoid unnecessary hospital referrals, hotlines are an important method of managing demand for stretched hospitals and protecting secondary care.
Here are 7 benefits of migrating local hotline arrangements to Consultant Connect:
1. There’s no risk of not capturing activity for EROC – the 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.
2. All specialties can be accessed by a single point of access – 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. Consultant Connect enables advice seekers to contact specialists via pre-programmed phone numbers in the app or by calling their organisation’s unique Dial-In Number, removing the need for phone books and busy switchboards.
3. The Consultant Connect App acts as a highly useful directory listing all specialties available along with their opening times and details of where the specialist answering the call is based.
4. Volumes of calls are tracked, giving ICBs/Health Boards, ICSs, Hospitals/Trusts an accurate record of Advice & Guidance activity from primary care. Outcomes left on calls also enable clinicians involved to track the patient’s pathway.
5. All calls are recorded for medico-legal purposes – meaning your hotlines are automatically GDPR-compliant. Calls can be downloaded and listened back to at any time via the browser. Many of our users utilise call recordings to inform training requirements and strategic decisions.
6. Calls to Consultant Connect get answered – because Consultant Connect routes calls through a rota of potentially-available specialists, rather than individuals, advice seekers have a better chance of getting through. If you need extra resource for answering calls, our out-of-area NHS consultants on the National Consultant Network (NCN) can back up existing lines or provide locally-unavailable specialties.
7. Consultant Connect doesn’t go out of date – our tech provides live updates for users, so when a service is added or altered, unlike directories, there is no chance of the number being out of service.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
Related materials:
- Enhanced Advice & Guidance performance benchmarks
- Formalising an existing line for better visibility and improved processes
- 5 minutes with… NHS consultants on the NCN
