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. 2019 Aug 23;9(7):e030173.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2019-030173.

Sociodemographic and health-related determinants for making repeated calls to a medical helpline: a prospective cohort study

Mitti Blakoe  1   2 , Hejdi Gamst-Jensen  1 , My von Euler-Chelpin  3 , Helle Collatz Christensen  1 , Tom Møller  2   4
Affiliations

Sociodemographic and health-related determinants for making repeated calls to a medical helpline: a prospective cohort study

Mitti Blakoe et al. BMJ Open. .

Abstract

Objectives: To identify sociodemographic and health-related characteristics of callers' making repeated calls within 48 hours to a medical helpline, compared with those who only call once.

Setting: In the Capital Region of Denmark people with acute, non-life-threatening illnesses or injuries are triaged through a single-tier medical helpline for acute, healthcare services.

Participants: People who called the medical helpline between 18 January and 9 February 2017 were invited to participate in the survey. During the period, 38 787 calls were handled and 12 902 agreed to participate. Calls were excluded because of the temporary civil registration number (n=78), the call was not made by the patient or a close relative (n=699), or survey responses were incomplete (n=19). Hence, the analysis included 12 106 calls, representing 11.131 callers' making single calls and 464 callers' making two or more calls within 48 hours. Callers' data (age, sex and caller identification) were collected from the medical helpline's electronic records. Data were enriched using the callers' self-rated health, self-evaluated degree of worry, and registry data on income, ethnicity and comorbidities. The OR for making repeated calls was calculated in a crude, sex-adjusted and age-adjusted analysis and in a mutually adjusted analysis.

Results: The crude logistic regression analysis showed that age, self-rated health, self-evaluated degree of worry, income, ethnicity and comorbidities were significantly associated with making repeated calls. In the mutually adjusted analysis associations decreased, however, odds ratios remained significantly decreased for callers with a household income in the middle (OR=0.71;95% CI 0.54 to 0.92) or highest (OR=0.68;95% CI 0.48 to 0.96) quartiles, whereas immigrants had borderline significantly increased OR (OR=1.34;95% CI 0.96 to 1.86) for making repeated calls.

Conclusions: Findings suggest that income and ethnicity are potential determinants of callers' need to make additional calls within 48 hours to a medical helpline with triage function.

Keywords: organisation of health services; quality In health care.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flowchart of calls included.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Division of the included calls into four strata: one-time callers, initial calls plus occurrence of repeated call, first repeated call within 48 hours and two or more repeated calls within 48 hours of the initial call.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Showing Crude, age-adjusted and gender-adjusted, and mutually adjusted ORs with 95% CI for health-related and sociodemographic characteristics for repeated calls <48 hours (n=464) compared with single calls (n=11 131) to the medical helpline.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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