OA32 A national survey of rheumatology telephone advice line support: user perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background/Aims Rheumatology telephone advice line services are struggling to manage increased patient demand. A survey of people with rheumatology arthritis (RA) by the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS) was undertaken to explore the experiences and expectations of telephone advice lines users. Methods A 4-week online survey, conducted in August 2024, collected data on demographics, how telephone advice lines function, reasons for contacting the service, whether the advice received was helpful and response times. Ways in which services could be improved was also sought. Data was analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis for free text comments. Results A total of 1423 participants completed the survey. The majority were female (n = 1338, 94%), white (n = 1455, 95%) had RA (n = 1288, 91%), with a disease duration of over 6 years (n = 975, 68%) and aged 61-80 years (n = 849, 56%). Most services were automated (n = 1273, 85%), although the preference was to speak to someone directly (n = 889, 59%). 836 (57%) felt that they were listened to in a supportive way. 989 (69%) participants had contacted the service 1-3 times over the last year and 847 (57%) were ‘very likely’ to use the advice line in the future. Participants were made aware of the telephone advice line by the rheumatology nurse (n = 1025, 72%) and it was the main health service participants contacted if they had a problem with their rheumatology condition (n = 1194, 84%). The main reasons for contacting the advice line were experiencing a flare (n = 946, 66%), pain (n = 876, 61) and concerns about medicines (n = 863, 61%). Most participants found the advice given to be ‘helpful-very helpful’ (n = 847, 59%) and were ‘confident to very confident’ (n = 866) they could carry out the advice given. 839 (56%) calls were returned within 48 hours. There were 665 free-text responses on how telephone advice lines services could be improved and these focused on three main areas: 1) increasing the advice line availability. Many services were only operational for a few hours on specific days. People in employment favoured weekend availability. 2) A timely response especially when experiencing pain. Response times were increasing and some participants received no response describing the service as “a very hit and miss process”. 3) Respondents recognised that without adequate resources including sufficient numbers of nurses, services would not be able to respond to patient need. Conclusion Telephone advice lines are highly valued and commonly used by people with inflammatory arthritis. Participants clearly recognised the current pressures and the lack of nurses to respond to calls in a timely manner. There is a clear need for service providers to review current services to enhance the patient experience including; accessibility, call response times and adequate staffing These findings align with those of a recent national survey of nurses providing advice line support (Ryan et al. 2024). Disclosure S. Ryan: None. A. Bosworth: None. S. Matthews: None. K. Jones: None.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".