Blackburn and NHS Direct pilot wellness
NHS Direct is to pilot its first web and telephone-based support service targeted at patients at risk of developing long term conditions.
News
NHS Direct pilots home working
NHS Direct is to consider allowing a large number of its staff to work from home, if a pilot shows positive results. The telephone and web advice service has already closed one of its sites in Portsmouth in order to allow staff to work from home. The organisation, which employs more than 3,000 people across the […]
News
GP leader names his NHS savings
Parts of NHS Direct, the Choose and Book service and the current ‘consent to view’ model of the Summary Care Record should all be reviewed to save money in the financial crisis, the BMA’s GP leader, Dr Laurence Buckman, said today. With NHS trusts under pressure to achieve efficiency savings of up to £20 billion […]
News
NHS Direct pilots decision aids
NHS Direct is piloting three online decision aids designed to help patients make more informed choices about medical tests and treatments where there is no clinical evidence about which are better for them. The online patient decision aids (OPDA), which are part of the first national web-based project in the UK of its kind, are […]
News
NHS Direct staff sickness ‘unacceptable’
More than one in ten staff at NHS Direct is off sick at any one time, clocking up an average 23 days sickness each per year. The figures, which NHS Direct said were “wholly unacceptable”, have contributed to the health helpline missing its target for answering less urgent and non-urgent calls. The helpline is also […]
News
NHS Direct plans to make £20m savings
NHS Direct has announced that it plans to cut its costs by £20m in the next financial year by improving call centre efficiency, making savings on IT and changing its staffing structure. The cuts sit alongside a longer term plan to reduce management and business costs by 30%, saving £8m, by 31 March 2011. The […]
News
NHS Direct developing online assessments
NHS Direct is working with a consortium of leading IT and health specialist organisations to introduce a new suite of online clinical assessments.
News
GPs back cuts to NHS Direct and NPfIT
NHS Direct and the National Programme for IT in the NHS are both appropriate targets for cuts in the current economic climate, according to GPs. A survey of almost 900 GPs by the GP newspaper Pulse found that 59% thought the health helpline NHS Direct should take a funding cut while 52% thought the national programme […]
News
Action follows disputed Carson report
West Yorkshire primary care trusts have moved to back TPP in the wake of the Carson report, which criticised the out-of-hours system used by West Yorkshire Urgent Care Service. The five PCTs, together with TPP, have issued a joint statement which says that the report from Dr David Carson “did not enjoy consensus amongst the […]
News
NHS Direct has busiest Xmas ever
More than 850,000 people accessed NHS Direct’s telephone and online services over the festive period, making it the helpline’s busiest ever Christmas and New Year. NHS Direct said performance statistics showed that it answered more than 330,000 telephone calls in the two week period between 19 December and 3 January and logged more than 520,000 […]
News