HSCIC takes NHS Direct services

The Health and Social Care Information Centre will take over some NHS Direct services, such as online symptom checkers, from April this year.

NHS Direct announced last October that it would close at the end of March 2014 and that its services will be commissioned to other organisations.

Some of its 700-strong workforce will be Tupe transferred to the HSCIC, which will take over running of the 111 repeat caller service, the health and symptom checkers and the telephony managed service, a report to the HSCIC’s January board meeting reveals.

NHS Direct’s 0845 telephone advice line will close at the end of next month at a cost of around £70m.

The dental nurse assessment service and complex health information and medicine enquiry service have not been recommissioned.

The HSCIC’s board paper says that all financial liability for taking on three of the remaining services will be underwritten.

The telephony managed service, which provides contact centre infrastructure services for 111 providers, has reported £350,000 funding gap, which is being addressed at the NHS Direct Closure Board, the paper says.

The demise of NHS Direct stems from the introduction of the urgent care helpline NHS 111 from April last year.

It won around a third of contracts to run 111, but decided in early October last year that to withdraw from all of its these contracts as they were “financially unsustainable”, putting the future of the organisation was in jeopardy. The announcement of its closure was made at the end of the month.

NHS Direct’s 111 contracts have since been transferred to alternative providers, most of them to ambulance trusts.