NHS 111 maybe unsafe for diagnosing children, leading paediatrician warns

The NHS 111 helpline may not be ‘safe and effective’ for diagnosing illness in young children, leading paediatrician Professor Neena Modi has warned.

Modi, who is the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), has questioned whether call handlers, who are not medically trained, should be carrying out assessments over the phone.

Speaking with the Press Association, Modi suggested that diagnosing over the phone and recognising a serious illness ‘gets more and more difficult the younger the child’, and said that the NHS 111 helpline has been brought in at great cost without proper evaluation of its effectiveness.

She said: “It is uncertain – because studies have not been adequately conducted – whether or not the telephone triage service such as NHS 111 is really going to be safe and effective for very small children.

“Even a clinician trying to make an assessment over the telephone would find it much more difficult in a smaller child than in an older child.

“Then when you add in the lack of clinical expertise, it’s going to be even more difficult. I feel really sorry for the call handlers because they are being placed in a position that really it’s questionable that they should be placed in.”

Modi also deplored the decline in out-of-hours GP services, which she described as a ‘great loss’ to the country. In the interview she suggests that if people were able to talk to a GP who knew their family and their children’s medical history this would give much greater insight into how serious the condition was.

Modi said: “If you were to be able to speak to a general practitioner who knew your family, knew you and your kids, they would have a much better understanding and insight into the seriousness of the condition that you were phoning up about.

“If you phone up a general practitioner surgery and you either get directed to NHS 111 or you get directed to a deputising [out-of-hours] service, and you speak to or see someone who doesn’t know you, doesn’t know your family and your children, it’s going to be much more difficult for that person to make a judgment.”