"It was very frustrating"

Dear David639

Thank you for sharing your experience on Care Opinion. I can only imagine how frustrating this would have been for you and I hope, by now, your wife has received the care she required and is doing better. I am very sorry to learn of this.

NHS 24, at times, over the four day festive periods each week, had a significant call demand and we worked tirelessly to manage this. At times, the wait times were longer than we would like. We are absolutely focussed on improving access to our service at all times. However, I fully appreciate your experience was extremely poor and I apologise for this. I would advise however, that NHS 24 does not terminate calls waiting in our queue to be answered. We are aware some mobile providers may cut calls due to the time on hold, therefore it may be worth exploring this with your mobile provider, if indeed you were calling from a mobile phone.

It may also be helpful to know we recently introduced a facility whereby callers can select to not wait for their call to be answered by selecting an option on our phone menu for us to call you back. This keeps your place in the queue, however saves you waiting on the phone. Many callers used this facility successfully. Something to bear in mind should be need to call in the future.

If you wish to discuss this further with us, it would be good to hear from you. Our Patient Experience Team can be contacted at Patient.Experience@nhs24.scot.nhs.uk. I have already shared your feedback with senior staff for their awareness and they have responded to me to advise they are vey sorry to learn of your poor experience. Thanks again for sharing this.

With best wishes to you both for 2024.

Kind regards

Shona