Managers order NHS 24 staff not to put Ebola risk patients in call back queue
Helen Puttick
Health Correspondent
Friday 9 January 2015
Managers have sent an urgent memo to frontline NHS 24 staff ordering them not to put patients at risk from Ebola in a call back queue, just days after the case of Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey.
Although it is not clear whether the Lanarkshire health worker used the NHS helpline when she returned home to Scotland, the email to the service's call operators raises questions whether she was given the priority that was essential.
The memo has been circulated across call centres emphasising that patients who visited countries where the disease is spreading and are at high risk of suffering from Ebola, must be treated as "serious and urgent."
In capital letters supervisors are told not to advise call handlers to list such patients among those who can wait for a nurse to ring them back later.
Nurses are told in red ink to sign forms as confirmation they read the memo and understood its content.
NHS 24 declined to comment on whether Pauline Cafferkey, who remains in a critical condition at the Royal Free Hospital in London, had rung the service when she fell ill on her return trip from Sierra Leone just before New Year.
Helen Puttick
Health Correspondent
Friday 9 January 2015
Managers have sent an urgent memo to frontline NHS 24 staff ordering them not to put patients at risk from Ebola in a call back queue, just days after the case of Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey.
Although it is not clear whether the Lanarkshire health worker used the NHS helpline when she returned home to Scotland, the email to the service's call operators raises questions whether she was given the priority that was essential.
The memo has been circulated across call centres emphasising that patients who visited countries where the disease is spreading and are at high risk of suffering from Ebola, must be treated as "serious and urgent."
In capital letters supervisors are told not to advise call handlers to list such patients among those who can wait for a nurse to ring them back later.
Nurses are told in red ink to sign forms as confirmation they read the memo and understood its content.
NHS 24 declined to comment on whether Pauline Cafferkey, who remains in a critical condition at the Royal Free Hospital in London, had rung the service when she fell ill on her return trip from Sierra Leone just before New Year.
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