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12
AFTER HOURS EMERGENCY TELEPHONE SERVICE
This service has received special notice in previous reports but it is again described in view of
its importance to persons who, outside normal office hours, require assistance with medical,
welfare or similar problems, within the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington
and Chelsea. It is financed jointly by the two boroughs but the telephone control centre is
based at Westminster City Hall. Four Duty Officers work on a rota system and have available
detailed files of information of all services, both emergency and normal. The Duty Officer assesses
each problem presented to him and whenever necessary telephones the appropriate standby
officer who initiates executive action or telephones the caller to give advice. With less pressing
cases the details are referred to the relevant day staff for attention in the usual way. In many
instances Duty Officers are able to advise on enquiries directly but their primary function is to put
callers in touch with the service required.
The stand-by officers always available through this emergency telephone service for Westminster
and Kensington and Chelsea include the Medical Officers of Health or their Deputies, Principal
and Senior Medical Officers, Mental Welfare Officers, Children's Officers, Welfare Officers,
Midwives, Public Health Inspectors, and, since the middle of the year under review. District Nurses
for the City of Westminster. Other senior officers in the Health and other departments of the
two Councils have supplied their private telephone numbers, so that they may be contacted to
give direction on non-medical emergencies. Private telephone numbers are not divulged to
any caller unless the officer gives express permission. It has in any case been found more
satisfactory in practice for the Duty Officer to accept responsibility for finding the officer required
and asking him to telephone the caller at a given number. This avoids the situation where the
caller may have to make several calls to alternative numbers, and ensures that if the particular
person required cannot be found a suitable substitute can be asked to help.
Hospitals, police, ambulance service, emergency medical relief services, general and specialist
medical practitioners, and a wide range of official and unofficial organisations are making reciprocal
use of the service. The Duty Officer can contact any of these on behalf of an officer called out on
a particular case, and conversely they can be put in touch with the stand-by officer most likely
to be able to help or advise on a given urgent problem. The Duty Officer has in addition details
of parallel emergency telephone services in other London Boroughs and elsewhere.
A typical range of cases dealt with are: emergency compulsory mental hospital admissions;
urgent admissions to general hospitals; emergency accommodation for homeless families and
individuals; booked and unbooked maternity cases; district nurses visits through the patient's
medical practitioner; juvenile care and protection cases; infectious disease notifications and
investigations; river flood precautions; removal of cadavers and Coroners' notifications; serious
sewerage leaks and similar problems. The Duty Officers deal directly with the urgent authentication
of International Certificates where early departure prevents this being done during normal office
hours; reception, storage and when necessary the urgent dispatch by special messenger of
bacteriological and food specimens for laboratory examination; issuing vaccines to medical
practitioners when these appear not to be readily available from the usual sources; giving information
about the location and times of health and welfare clinics, including venereal disease clinics
which are dealt with on a separate direct telephone line; and cremation bookings for the City of
Westminster.
During the period 1st January to 31st December, 1967, a total of 9,363 (7,492) calls were
received, 6,908 (4,936) relating to the City of Westminster and 2,455 (2,556) to the Royal Borough
of Kensington and Chelsea. An analysis is given in Table 8, page 68, from which it will be seen
that the most numerous classified calls again concerned mental health and child welfare. The
increase in the number of miscellaneous calls in the latter half of the year are accounted for by
the inclusion of the Westminster District Nurses visits in these figures, superimposed upon a more
general trend of the public and other people to make greater use of this service to help resolve
problems not covered by the other headings. The overall rise in the Westminster midwifery
figures is not due to a higher reproductive rate, so much as the fact that these cases are now
referred to the duty Midwife through the emergency telephone system instead of via the Sutherland
Avenue Office as in the previous year.