On 30 Dec 1998 21:59:24 -0000, [log in to unmask] ("Trefor
Roscoe") wrote:
>our coop dealt with over 3000 calls from Xmas eve to Tuesday am. Anyone
>busier than that?
>
Our feedback suggests that co-ops and dep services nationwide received
5 calls per member-GP per day over the three busy days. Therefore the
c500-GP schemes like Devon (Midge) and NYED (Paul Caldwell) were
dealing with about 2,500 calls a day and about 8,500 over the whole
Christmas period. Trefor's figures for Sheffield would fit that
pattern.
Quite a few schemes were saturated on Monday and would undoubtedly
have taken more calls had callers not encountered jammed lines and
given up or gone off to join 5hr queues at A&E.
This is not an unusual phenomenon in four day Christmases and I don't
see what co-ops can do to alleviate it short of building in extra
call-management capacity for just a few days each year. This of
course means much expense on extra phone lines, ops room capacity, IT
and everything else, and with so many schemes shoehorned into shared
premises it usually isn't a viable option. Having experienced the
co-op management side at Christmas I have to say I don't think full
coverage of the fourth day of Christmas is entirely safe, and I
believe surgeries should open-up for just a couple of hours in the
morning.
Maybe NHS-Direct will help, but of course these schemes will face
exactly the same holiday and weekend peaks, and with calls taking
about eight minutes to triage using the decision support systems it
isn't hard to envisage an even worse state of overload.
The answer has to be in educating patients to self-manage
self-manageable problems. Goodness knows how you all achieve that,
the answer may yet lie in charging them a fee.
Happy New Year
--
Lynn Woods
Managing Director, Adastra Software Ltd www.adastra.co.uk
Call Management Systems/Mobile Data/Computer Networks/24hr support
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