Key Statistics

50

Contact Centre Agents

400

Average Calls Per Day

800

Average Calls Per Weekend

24/7

Year Round Availability

This led to discussions with A&E staff, who were concerned that workloads and peaks and troughs in non-emergency attendances be managed. The result was CAV 24/7 – the first service of its kind in Wales – providing a 365 day per year call-handling service.

The Connecting Wales service is shortly to be extended to also include telephony call-backs from clinicians within Cardiff Royal Infirmary, which is currently conducted through health board telephony services.

Because an out-of-hours service for Cardiff and Vale Health Board was already in existence and on the Connecting Wales platform, it was simple to scale-up a highly resilient and secure CAV 24/7 service on the existing telephony platform. Recruitment of staff was an initial challenge.

Costs were based on the Connecting Wales framework agreement, which ensures easy and affordable procurement for public sector bodies. Thanks to the framework agreement, the solution required no additional call charges for outbound call-backs from clinicians.

Because of the nature of the cloud-based platform, call handlers and clinicians can potentially work from home in the future. It’s a triage-system being considered by many other health boards and is likely to be a feature of healthcare even after the pandemic ends to evenly spread workloads and hospital attendance.