NHS Direct

"What is NHS Direct?

NHS Direct is at the forefront of 24-hour health care - delivering telephone and e-health information services day and night direct to the public. Although the organisation started out in 1997, it has been growing and changing over that time, most noticeably since April 2004.

It is now far more than a telephone health line - NHS Direct has an authoritative health website, and 2004 saw the addition of the NHS Direct digital TV service - one of the largest interactive services in the UK. Over two million people now access NHS Direct every month.

Mission statement

To provide information and advice about health, illness and health services, to enable patients to make decisions about their healthcare and that of their families."




What a marvelous thing, all those services and so efficient too.

On the few occasions that I or Mrs NotaSheep have had to call NHS Direct we have been amazed at how slow and inefficient the process is and it always ends up with the promise of a call back within 3-4 hours and us deciding we'd rather get some sleep and see if we are still alive in the morning.


Today I read in The Telegraph that "Every call answered by NHS Direct costs taxpayers more than £16 despite attempts to cut costs at the health helpline. A single telephone query is almost as expensive as a visit to a GP, official figures show...Despite restructuring and a hiring freeze, documents presented to the board of NHS Direct show that so far this year the "total cost per call answered" has been £16.54. Although the figure is predicted to fall by the end of the financial year to £15.91, that is still almost £2 per call more than the budget allows."


"Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "NHS Direct has been going for 10 years now, and there is still no sign of it offering value for money. Millions that could be spent on frontline staff or sorely needed drugs currently denied to people are lavished on a service that often advises people to visit their GP anyway.

"Its continuing ineffectiveness raises serious questions about the Government's capacity to effectively manage the NHS.""


The Labour Government wasting money, surely not.




PostScript:
The NHS Direct website informs us that Health information is available in other languages - those languages being "Arabic, Bengali, French, Gujarati, Korean, Polish, Portugese, Punjabi, Somali, Spanish, Turkish and Urdu.
I think I can see where some of the money has gone. Have you ever tried to get free medical assistance in Spain or France, it require being able to speak the relevant native tongue. Maybe a lesson there for this wasteful government. It also strikes me that £4.5million didn't pay for a spellchecker, I thought Portugese was spelt Portuguese...