Patients contacting NHS 111 in England are having to wait so long for medical help that they are abandoning millions of calls, with 3.6m ditched in the past 12 months, official figures reveal.
The national helpline service is supposed to make it quicker and easier for patients to get the right advice or treatment they need, either for their physical or mental health. It is billed as being open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
However, analysis by the House of Commons Library, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats, shows callers are waiting so long to speak to someone that nearly one in five give up. In 2022, 3,682,516 calls to NHS 111 were abandoned.
Last night, MPs said the “dire” figures exposed how the NHS had reached “breaking point” after years of “neglect and underfunding” by the government.
The data suggests that, on average, more than 10,000 callers hang up every day without receiving medical advice or treatment.
As well as being distressing for those who are unwell, abandoned NHS 111 calls pose a risk to patient safety. The problem also increases pressure on other urgent care services as people seek care elsewhere.
“It is completely unacceptable that so many people in need of urgent medical advice are struggling to get through to NHS 111,” said the Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey. “Staff are exhausted, patients are left in pain, but still Conservative ministers are burying their heads in the sand.”
The analysis shows that last year almost one in five callers (17.8%) to NHS 111 gave up before getting through. The worst month was December, when 41% of callers hung up before receiving medical advice or treatment.
“No one should be forced to abandon a call because wait times are so long when they are in need of urgent medical help,” said Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, who commissioned the analysis.
“The government must urgently address this dire situation. We need a proper long-term plan to tackle staff shortages, or the NHS will be exposed to the same winter crises year after year.”
The average waiting time to get through to an NHS 111 call handler in December was 25 minutes. At the time, NHS 111 reported “levels of demand not seen since the start of the Covid pandemic”.
On Tuesday, Davey will visit Surrey, the region with the country’s worst record on abandoned NHS 111 calls. Almost half of south-east callers (48%) gave up while trying to get through to the helpline in December.
He will call for an emergency recruitment drive of NHS 111 call handlers, including encouraging retired and former staff to return. “The government must urgently hire and train more staff to take 111 calls, or else millions more people will be left in pain for far too long,” he said last night.
He is also calling for a wider NHS rescue plan, including recruiting 8,000 more GPs.
“Local health services across the country are at breaking point after years of neglect and underfunding from this Conservative government,” he said.
“The Conservative government’s record on health has been a shambles and today’s figures are yet further proof that we cannot trust them to run the NHS.”
The Department of Health and Social Care said it planned to increase the number of NHS 111 call handlers to 4,800.
“Our plan will deliver one of the fastest and longest sustained improvements in emergency waiting times in the NHS’s history, with £14.1bn made available for health and social care over the next two years on top of record funding,” a spokesperson said.
• This article’s main image was changed on 11 April 2023. An earlier image showed a call centre for NHS 24, which is part of NHS Scotland.
