NHS 111 Online Study

Examining patient pathways and workforce implications of NHS 111 Online.

We have completed this study and the final report ‘A multimethod study of NHS 111 online’ is published on the NIHR Journals Library website and can be downloaded here.

We continue to work on outputs from the study. Our Australian research team members Kate Churruca, Louise Ellis and Jeffrey Braithwaite led our paper about the Healthdirect service, and this has been accepted by the journal Digital Health as “The place of digital triage in a complex healthcare system: An interview study with key stakeholders in Australia’s national provider” and we hope it will be in print soon. Jen MacLellan led the “Emergency department staff views of NHS 111 First: qualitative interview study in England" paper which under review and we have a further paper on the eHealth literacy component of the study in preparation.

Catherine presented the ‘The Remarkable invisibility of NHS 111 online’ at the BSA Medical Sociology Conference in Lancaster in September 2022 and in November 2022 for the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences seminar series. This paper has been published in the Sociology of Health and Illness and is available here. We also described issues encountered conducting this research in our paper ‘Infrastructure challenges to doing health research “where populations with the most disease live” in Covid times—a response to Rai et al’ published in BMC Medical Research Methodology.

In July 2022 we co-presented a workshop (with researchers from the University of Sheffield) titled ‘Knowing what we know now, would you build NHS 111 online? An interactive workshop exploring findings from two NIHR studies that examined what people think about NHS 111 online and its impact on the wider health system’ at https://hsruk.org/conferences/conference-2022. We have also presented the findings to the NHS Digital Urgent and Emergency Care Digital Team, the Digital First Primary Care Network at NHS England and NHS Improvement and to the Deep End patient and public network who supported the research.

We are very happy to present this work at seminars or meetings of researchers, health care professionals or patient and public engagement groups – please get in touch.

If you would like more details about this study please contact catherine.pope@phc.ox.ac.uk