Hectic

Back from my leave and despite the school holidays finishing demand is still up and the NHS as a whole is still very busy.
I have been involved with dealing with a "frequent caller" this week. This is some one who is contacting 999, 111 or the out of hours GP service on a regular basis, they may also be contacting the police. To reduce these call levels the trust have a dedicated team who identify this type of caller this information is then passed to the local operations teams who attend meetings etc on behalf of the trust.
Once identified the trust will contact the patients GP to gain more information about them. Often the increase in calls is due to patient having a ongoing medical problem which may have worsened or changed in the way it is presenting. It may give new symptoms including falls or pain. Often with the help of the GP and other agencies these callers can receive the help assistance or changes to medication that they need. It may be that the level of home care they are receiving needs to increased or the times of visits altered to help avoid falls.
 However there are those that despite this combined approach their call volume continue to increase at this point the team write to the patient and their GP to inform them of the continued number of high calls and again to try to identify the cause for this continued call volume. At this stage often a multi disciplinary, multi agency meeting may be held to discuss and review the patient.
 To put this in perspective at this point it is likely that these patient will be calling 999, 111 or the out of hours service at least once a day if not more, on average. At this type of meeting all agencies and healthcare professionals involved with the patient will be represented and information , current treatments and inputs from community teams will be discussed to see if there is more that can be done for the patient. Often these patients will be well known to the teams and alternative care plans will be formed to try to help these patients.
The patients well being is central to these discussions as there is normally an underlying reason for there call volume and there are multiple methods that may be used to try to gain the patient the help that they need from one or multiple agencies or disciplines.
If that fails to reduce the call volume  further action then take place and I will outline those  in my next blog.
I hope you have all had a good few weeks while I have been away.