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J R Soc Med 2008;101:364-371
doi:10.1258/jrsm.2008.080006
© 2008 Royal Society of Medicine
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How fast is fast enough? An audit and league table of response times of acute hospital NHS Trust switchboards in England

Kayvan Shokrollahi Sujatha Tadiparthi   Sathish Jayagopal

Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery, Department of Plastic Surgery, Morriston Hospital Swansea SA6 6NL, UK
Countess of Chester Hospital, Department of Plastic Surgery Liverpool Road, Chester, Cheshire CH2 1UL, UK

Correspondence to: K Shokrollahi kshokrollahi{at}hotmail.com

Objective To audit response times by all acute NHS hospital switchboards in England for external incoming calls. As with any audit, we set out to draw attention to efficiencies and deficiencies in the system, highlight problems, and suggest the first steps towards improving standards in a very important and poorly acknowledged part of our healthcare system.

Design Telephone calls were made to hospital switchboards, and time to response was measured. The results were then audited.

Setting Acute hospital NHS Trust switchboards in England.

Main outcome measures Time to response by hospital switchboards. The target time was 20 seconds.

Results Only 36% of 219 hospital switchboards met the 20 second target, with the average answering time across all switchboards being 45 seconds. The best performer was University Hospital North Durham (mean = 1 second) and the worst Bristol Royal Infirmary (mean = 381 seconds). We found that automated answer systems substantially increase the answer time to an operator; the fastest automated service was at Princess Royal University Hospital, which was ranked 69th.

Conclusions We recommend a formal NHS-wide audit system for switchboard response times.


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