Hear and Treat Safety, Appropriateness and Acceptability

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Evaluation of telephone advice for low urgency ambulance service calls

• IRAS ID

  201119

• Contact name

  Joanne E Coster

• Contact email

  j.e.coster@sheffield.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Sheffield

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 11 months, 31 days

• Research summary

  The number and type of calls received by the ambulance service have increased dramatically over the past 10 years. A large proportion of calls received by the ambulance service do not need an emergency response and some can be managed without sending an ambulance. Ambulance services have implemented service level changes to ensure that callers receive a timely and clinically appropriate response. This means that after an initial assessment of call urgency, people with lower urgency problems may receive health advice over the telephone (hear and treat) instead of an ambulance response. This study aims to investigate the clinical safety, appropriateness and acceptability to patients of this type of ambulance response. The study will achieve this in two ways
  1) Analysis of an existing linked research dataset, which has ambulance data linked with subsequent Accident and Emergency, hospital and national mortality data. This will be used to find out what happens to patients after they receive telephone advice from the ambulance service.
  2) Patient survey to identify what happens to patients following ambulance telephone advice and patients views and experience of this type of service

  This is a PhD student research project.

• REC name

  London - Chelsea Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  16/LO/2242

• Date of REC Opinion

  21 Dec 2016

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion