Repeat Caller Service

Summary

The Repeat Caller Service is a national service and a core part of the Integrated Urgent Care national architecture. It acts as an audit for the NHS 111 service, monitoring users who have been processed through the service 3 times or more in a 96 hour period.

NHS 111 services are required to search the Repeat Caller Service at the beginning of each urgent care encounter. The search contains a minimal set of patient demographics, which are used to identify the caller.

If a caller's identity has been verified against the Personal Demographics Service (PDS), the person's NHS number will be used as the primary search term.

If a caller's identity has not been verified against the PDS, recorded demographic information will be used to try and match the person to existing records. The demographic items supported are:

a verified NHS Number (only included if person is verified against the PDS)
first and last name
date of birth
gender
postcode

Using the available search criteria, we can find out if a caller has already called in the last 96 hours. These records are only stored for a maximum of 96 hours.

Implementation requirements

All IT systems used for receiving initial urgent care encounters must have connectivity to the Repeat Caller Service.

Systems should support both Repeat Caller Queries and Clinical Data Architecture (CDA) document submissions of completed encounters.

Using the Repeat Caller Service

Any system managing people making first contact with Integrated Urgent Care should query the Repeat Caller Service to identify if that person has previously contacted the Integrated Urgent Care service.

If a caller's identity has been verified against the PDS, their NHS Number should be included in the query and will be used as the primary search term.

If a person's identity has not been verified against the PDS, their NHS Number should not be included within the query - the query should only include recorded demographic details.

If a person is identified as having called twice previously within the last 96 hours, they should be transferred to a clinician as a minimum level of priority (anything of a higher priority should be followed).

When an encounter is completed, a CDA document should be submitted to the Repeat Caller Service.

Submission errors

If a submission attempt is unsuccessful, the system must continue trying to submit the document for 96 hours.

Systems should continue to retry the submission, unless the queued submission is explicitly removed from the submission queue by a user.

Configuration requirements

Systems should provide the ability to disable Repeat Caller Service queries when necessary.

If Repeat Caller Service queries are disabled, the system should always prompt the user to confirm whether the caller has called before to establish whether they are a repeat caller.

The following settings should be configurable in the system without requiring new development/releases:

the ability to enable and disable Repeat Caller Service interactions
endpoint URLs for the Repeat Caller Service - endpoints for submissions and queries should be separately configured

Requirements for submitting documents

Retry logic

If a submission attempt is unsuccessful, the submission should be queued to retry the submission.

Systems should continue to retry the submission until a reasonable number of attempts have failed, or until submission is removed from the queue by a user.

Systems should implement retry logic which increases the amount of time between retries with each subsequent retry.

Monitoring

Systems should notify users to failed submissions, and provide them with appropriate tools to monitor and respond to issues.

Contact details

For more information about the Repeat Caller Service, call the National Helpdesk Exeter on 0300 303 4034 or email exeter.helpdesk@nhs.net.