The NHS 111 urgent care advice line has prevented over 12 million unnecessary A&E visits, according to new data from NHS England and Improvement.
 
Approximately 80 million calls were made to the NHS 111 service between its launch in April 2011 and September 2018. Over that time more than one in four people (28 per cent) would otherwise have had to go to A&E and three million people would have called an ambulance unnecessarily.
 
Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director for England said: “Ambulances and A&E will always be there in an emergency, but people can now also be helped quickly and expertly by phone, online and thanks to our Long Term Plan through new and upgraded services like Urgent Treatment Centres and our Clinical Assessment Service accessed via NHS 111.”
 
Over half of all callers to NHS 111 now have direct clinical input from a trained medical professional, such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists, compared to just a quarter in November 2016.​