A day in the life of a Clinical Advisor

Anis is a Clinical Advisor for South-west NHS 111 service at Practice Plus Group

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I’ve been with Practice Plus Group’s Integrated Urgent Care as a clinical advisor for four years. I joined the call centre in Dudley first, and now I work from home with the South West NHS 111 Service.

I mostly work an 11-hour shift depending on the day, completing an average of about 35 hours a week now.

As the day begins, I log on and check my emails. At around 8:30am, I’m ready to take my first call. Call duration varies depending upon the nature of the phone call, as the level of assistance or advice needed for each patient is different.

“My work-life balance is very good…I can pick up the kids from school, make food, and eat with them. And right after that, jump back on duty.”

Anis Desai

I evaluate each case and decide whether it is critical or an emergency and decide whom to refer to. The people calling will present with a variety of health issues, it might be anything from a frail elderly patient feeling vulnerable, to someone who has a urinary tract infection. That adds a lot of variety to my role.

As Clinical Advisors, we’ve got to do our best to screen patients and refer them to the most appropriate service and care with the help of Care Transition Measures, a set of survey questions used as a tool by Clinical Advisors. Assessing the patient helps me enhance my clinical acumen and questioning skills.

Whilst it is the clinician’s job to act upon the questions listed on the NHS Pathways’ system, a highly advanced triage tool to help assess the caller, it is my responsibility to make the patients feel at ease as I assess them. This role has really pushed me to look further into some of the questions on Pathways and do my own research on it, improving my clinical knowledge. It has made me very proactive.

Homeworking in terms of delivering care over the phone is challenging in the sense that you don’t have the face-to-face contact and interaction with patients, and so I must constantly improve my questioning skills. However, homeworking comes with its own benefits. My work-life balance is very good. I do split shifts even when I am working from home. So, I can pick the kids up from school, make food and eat with them. And right after that, jump back on duty. The rotas are very flexible, and I cannot possibly complain about that!

During the day, I would interact with the wider team members, who are always a call away to support and guide me. I have access to clinical team managers with different backgrounds in nursing and paramedics, who can provide further advice when I am unsure. I always learn something new from them, and I know they also are learning from the work we do. There is a good exchange of information between the different disciplines.
If there is time between patient calls, I do some training, or catch up with CPDs to improve the quality of the care I deliver. The ongoing Pathways training support provided by Practice Plus Group and the mandatory hot topics training scheduled every month have equipped me better for the job.

In a day, I would take an average of 31-40 calls and when it’s time to turn my computer off, I feel fulfilled: I was there for my patients and now they are being looked after by the best in the field.

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