NHS 24 “still cannot cope” with demand, Scottish Labour warned as figures showed nearly one in four calls has gone unanswered. The out-of-hours advice and triage service operates the 111 non-emergency number.
A freedom of information request from the party shows, of the 785,456 calls made to NHS 24 in the past five months, 180,940 (23 per cent) were abandoned. The unanswered call rate was more than a quarter in March (27.5 per cent) and June (27 per cent).
The average waiting time to contact the service was just over 22 minutes in June – up nearly five minutes on January’s 17.5 minutes the Daily Record reports.
