A report that shows the response time of the switchboards in the UK wit the NHS, 45 seconds is not bad, but I would hate to be the one stuck for 18 minutes in the case of a real emergency.  BD

Nearly two thirds of NHS acute hospital switchboards fail to answer incoming calls within twenty seconds. The longest wait was 18 minutes. The average answering time across all switchboards was 45 seconds, and fifty hospitals took more than a minute on average. The authors made a total of 657 calls (at their own cost) over a one month period and at three specific timeslots on different days. The data measured answering times provided by human operators and answering services, and consistency of response.

Mr Kayvan Shokrollahi is available for comment.
‘How fast is fast enough? An audit and league table of response times of acute NHS Trust switchboards in England’ is published in the July issue of the Journal of the Royal Medical Society, volume 101.

The NHS Number You Have Dialed Is Busy. Please Die Later,” UK