Agenda item

To receive an update report on the NHS 111 service.  The update will be provided by a representative of the Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group.

Tony Menzies, Leicester City Clinical Commissioning Group provided an update on the roll-out of the NHS 11 service across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. 

The NHS 111 service provided by Derbyshire Health United went live on 9 September 2013 and anyone dialling ‘111’ was connected direct to the service.  The following day NHS Direct was made unavailable in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland and callers were re-directed by a voice message to call ‘111’.  On 24 September GP practices in West Leicestershire CCG began the process of directing patients to the NHS 111 service for out of hours service.  The performance of the service between 9-22 September was monitored and 98.46% of the 2,481 calls were answered within 60 seconds.

GPs in the East Leicestershire CCG would transfer their out of hours calls to the ‘111’ service on 23 October 2013 and the GPs in the City CCG were due to transfer out of hours call on 5 November.

Members were informed that the performance of the service was monitored daily by tele-conference,  involving the three CCGs, the clinical lead, GP out of hours service and clinicians from other urgent care services.   There was also weekly clinical review meeting every week with clinicians from the urgent care services for all three CCG areas. 

Members questioned whether the 5 November was realistic for the City out of hours switch over, given that it was within the Diwali festivities and also Bonfire Night which traditionally led to increased volumes of calls, particularly as the switch over had been delayed by a week due to a ‘minor performance issue’.  Members also asked further questions of the service provision.

The Healthwatch representative reported that an impact assessment had been requested from Derbyshire United Health and a short response had been received.  A full impact assessment had then been requested to indicate how the service intended to reach different patient groups in the three CCG areas, especially where English was not the first language.  A response was awaited.

In response it was stated that:-

·         A local equality impact assessment had been carried out locally and Mr Menzies agreed to share it with the Commission and Healthwatch;

·         The service did provide a full translation service for users;

·         The decision to delay the roll-out by a week had been based on a three hour period one Saturday morning when performance fell 1% short of the required standard of 95% of calls being answered in 30 seconds.  This had been due to a high level of absence and an IT/Operational issue.  Performance had been satisfactory since then.  The decision to delay the roll-out had been based on extremely cautious approach and the service was now confident it could deal with the expected volume of calls.

RESOLVED:

1)    that the update report be received and noted;

2)    that the CCG submit the local equality impact assessment to the Commission’s next meeting and to Healthwatch;

3)    that performance and complaints data together with a further update on the implementation of the service be submitted to the January meeting of the Commission.