It has identified the patterns of health problems and outcomes of calls presented to NHS 24 and explored how these vary by time of call (in-hours and out-of-hours) and characteristics of the user (age, sex deprivation, etc).
Three broad themes were identified: 1) the midwife in relationship with the woman, 2) orchestration of an environment of care, and 3) the outcomes of care, called "life journeys" for the woman and the midwife.
Mellers recently proposed an account of emotional experiences associated with the outcomes of decisions called "decision affect theory".
This is the first study to examine the symptoms and outcome of calls made to NHS Direct for and on behalf of young children.
This is the first study to examine the symptoms and outcome of calls made to NHS Direct for and on behalf of young children (0 15).
This data set allowed us to examine all of the calls made across the year in terms of type of symptom, duration of symptom and outcome of call for all in-hours and out-of-hours calls.
The outcome of calls was categorised into 11 groups: self-care, GP urgent, GP same day, GP routine, health/medication information, accident and emergency service (A&E), 999, community, walk in centre, dental and other (see table 1).
As supported by internal audits, the highest outcome of calls across all age groups was health information and/or self-care advice, with statistics suggesting around 40 50% of all calls made by or on behalf of children aged 0 15 were managed with no onward referral needed, which supports previous audits.
With these measures, quality (defined as use of structure and Motivational Interviewing techniques, and concrete actions as outcomes of the calls) was improved while call length decreased to approximately 30 min.
And we have a clinical governance system that reviews calls and the outcomes of the calls, and the performance of the operators, the GPs, nurses, etc. (General Practitioner) The positive, with using that system, was that the calls used to take on average 2 minutes …. with the old system, they didn't need as many operators, so it was more cost effective.
