A PATIENT group has raised concerns that one in five people in Lancashire have never heard of the NHS 111 helpline.

Healthwatch Lancashire surveyed 1,163 people to gauge awareness of the non-emergency service, and found that 235 had never heard of it.

Of those who had used the service, three-quarters had found it useful.

Healthwatch has shared the report with North West Ambulance Service (NWAS), which runs the helpline, and chief executive Gill Brown said: “The results of our research have identified that there is a need for more awareness of the NHS 111 service.”

The helpline has already come under fire in recent weeks, with critics saying it contributed to a huge surge in patients at emergency wards across the country, leaving hospital staff under extreme pressure.

Dr Adam Black, an executive member of Blackburn with Darwen Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), recently pointed out that call handlers are not clinically trained, so will often pass patients on to ambulance crews or out-of-hours GPs to “avoid risk”.

The Healthwatch data appears to back this up, with just 16 of the 397 respondents who had used the service saying it resulted in advice from the call handler.

More than half had been directed to hospital, the ambulance service, out-of hours GPs, urgent care or walk-in centres.

But Ian Moses, head of 111 operations at NWAS, claimed it was ‘very positive’ that 80 per cent of respondents had heard of the service.

He added: “We would firstly like to thank Healthwatch Lancashire for carrying out this survey into the use of the NHS 111 Service in their region.

“Findings such as these are invaluable to building a safe, dependable and useful service for the people of the North West, when in need of urgent medical attention

“As the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) is currently managing the service as a stability partner, our main task has been to stabilise the service as a whole and subsequently we have slowly started to build up the presence of NHS 111 throughout the North West.

“While this survey appears to demonstrate high numbers of referrals to ambulance response, the overall ambulance referral rate is actually only 10 per cent of our total calls, which emphasises that NHS 111 is here for all kinds of health advice, from potential emergencies to simple medication and pharmacy opening time queries.”