Customer Care is our Priority

At Nottingham On Call, our customer’s safety and care is our number one priority. Our call centre and rapid response team are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Our customers wearing a pendant alarm can alert our team if they need urgent assistance in their home, take ill or have a fall.

Once contact is made, our highly qualified team will triage the customer thoroughly to decide the best step to take next.

If the customer is in a medical emergency then the call handler will call for an ambulance immediately and stay on the line while they wait for the ambulance to arrive.

Unfortunately, in the current climate, the NHS’s ambulance service have been under increasing pressure and wait times have been increasing more and more.

This is why at Nottingham On Call we will always thoroughly assess each situation we are dealing with individually to make sure we can help our customer with the correct help as soon as possible.

Some scenarios will require an ambulance and 999 will be called immediately in these circumstances.

In some instances, if a customer has had a fall but is deemed uninjured from the triage process, we can refer to the Urgent Community Response Service who can attend between 8am and 8pm to undertake a falls lift to get them back on their feet.

This will not only ease pressure on the NHS but will mean the individual won’t be waiting potentially for long periods to be responded to by an ambulance. If the customer’s situation isn’t a medical emergency the ambulance will put it as low priority while they deal with the highest level emergencies.

We will always contact the customers next of kin to advise that an emergency call has been raised and to see if they can attend the home to assist.

We will sometimes advise our customers to call 111 for medical advice. This would only be in a non medical emergency but if it is something we feel 111 could help with, this is what we would recommend. We can call 111 for the customer if required, however due to data protection they are likely to need to call the customer back to speak to them directly.

This again is to ensure our customer get the assistance required efficiently and will in turn ease pressures on the ambulance service and NHS where possible.

As stated above, our main priority is ensuring our customers are cared for and assisted in the fastest and most appropriate way.

Where Nottingham on Call do need to call an ambulance and stay on the line until the ambulance arrives an unfortunate consequence can be a high phone bill.  Where the care alarm is plugged into the customers landline any calls made are charged to the customers phone bill. Where an alarm is raised, ambulance called and a long wait time, this also means a long phone call charged to the customer. In some occasions these have been £40 - £60 for the one phone call due to the long ambulance wait. One way to avoid high call costs is to opt for a digital alarm.  These do not plug into a landline and have a SIM card for transmitting alerts and there is no call charges for the customer.  If interested in opting for a digital alarm please call our Service Advisors on 0115 746 9101.