WITH a single call patients in Oxfordshire can now get access to ambulance, dental, pharmacy and mental health services.

That is the promise of South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SCAS), which now has the contract to manage the local NHS 111 system.

Lynda Lambourne, director of integrated urgent care for SCAS, spoke to members of the county’s Healthwatch watchdog recently and said she and her colleagues had been working hard to implement a joined up network since they won the contract last year.

She said: “It’s building on the original 111 service but bringing in pharmacy, dentists, community services, mental health etc.

“We try to work across the whole system to reduce the impact on A&E and 999 by booking more people in when we can.”

Ms Lambourne, who has been with SCAS since 2012, said the key to making this work was sharing records so people did not have to keep on repeating their information as well as having an increased number of GPs, nurses and paramedics on the phone lines.

She said: “In some ways I think there are now too many services with varying opening hours that can make it very confusing to access the help they provide.

“We wanted to get back to having a single point of contact for people, so we can direct someone to the best service for them.”

“In the past one of the criticisms has been that things weren’t being passed through, so someone would be booked to go to a walk in clinic and then turn up and the staff wouldn’t know anything about it. We’ve solved a lot of those problems now.”

Oxfordshire Healthwatch chairman, Professor George Smith, praised the idea behind the new system and added it would be helpful if there was a better understanding about the service and what it could provide.

Ms Lambourne agreed and said: “I think even among medical professionals there is sometimes a misunderstanding about what 111 is and does.”

She added she believed more effort had not been placed into advertising the system nationally due to fears of 'overloading the system'.

The former nurse admitted it was difficult to keep up with increasing demand, which has surged across the six counties SCAS operates in, from about 175,000 calls a year in 2012 to 1.2 million.

As part of a drive to recruit more staff SCAS held an open day on Saturday at its headquarters.