Ashford NHS 111 Contact Centre, Kent

Our Care Coordination Centre, also known as the Contact Centre, in Ashford, Kent, serves as the hub for delivering urgent care to the public through our NHS 111 service - operated by Integrated Care 24 (IC24).

Our NHS 111 contact centres are the first port of call for patients phoning NHS 111 services. NHS 111 helps the public get the right advice, information and treatment when they urgently need it.

Clinicians, such as nurses, physiotherapists and other Allied Health Professionals, doctors, paramedics are employed to speak to people who phone. Some people are given advice without needing to use Accident and Emergency departments, while others are advised and directed to primary care services, emergency services or treatment centres.

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Careers with us

The clinical job roles we recruit for at our Contact Centres are Health Advisors and Clinical Advisors (although, technically, Health Advisors are non-clinical). For our Clinical Advisors we recruit people with a clinical background and experience, notably nurses.

“I enjoy having that one to one time with a patient. It's uninterrupted time with that patient. It's not that way when you're working in a busy acute hospital. You know, you actually feel like you're making a difference in that person's life.”

Gigi Peverill - Nurse and Clinical Advisor at IC24

Clinical Advisor

Our Clinical Advisors are active healthcare professionals with a registration with the NMC or HCPC. So, we hire nurses and allied healthcare professionals for this role. Our Clinical Advisors would receive requests for assistance, treatment, or care at our NHS 111 contact centres.

Using telecommunications, they are responsible for assessing callers with a wide spectrum of clinical conditions; advising them on home care management, next steps and referring them on to further care when appropriate. The computer-based clinical decision system will facilitate and support the advice given. They work as part of a multidisciplinary team providing high-quality, evidence-based healthcare to the immediate needs of the patient.

“A call initially comes through to a health advisor. The more complex calls come through to clinicians such as myself. We call patients back and go through their current issues. They’re taken through an initial assessment. My responsibility is to then signpost to the next, correct service. That could be an emergency service, ambulance service, treatment centre, or a mental health crisis team.”

Gigi Peverell - Nurse and Clinical Advisor at IC24 Ashford

“I enjoy having that one to one time with a patient. It's uninterrupted time with that patient. It's not that way when you're working in a busy acute hospital. You know, you actually feel like you're making a difference in that person's life.”

Gigi Peverill - Clinical Advisor at IC24 (read Gigi's interview with Nurses.co.uk)

Health Advisor

Health Advisors work in our NHS 111 contact centres (Care Co-ordination Centre) and they manage calls from patients and healthcare professionals with urgent and non -urgent healthcare needs, using the Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) appropriately to direct the patient to the service suitable for their needs. Our Health Advisors deal with a variety of calls that range from minor illnesses to life threatening situations every day.

Technically, Health Advisors are non-clinical, and so your function is to triage and feed into the clinical side of the system.As a Health Advisor at IC24, when our patients dial 111 you will be the first point of contact and the voice at the end of the line. It'll be up to you to deliver sometimes life-changing advice, triaging a wide range of calls and providing safe, effective assessments and non-clinical advice using the NHS Pathways System.

“The bulk of the calls we deal with are things like throat infections, during infection. It can range from a lot of things, for instance people that possibly might be having a heart attack. It’s not an easy job, but if you’re the type of person who likes to help people, it is a very rewarding job.”

Ian Maben - Health Advisor, IC24

“There is that really nice special moment where you can say to someone, I can get you that care today. They just want to be heard and understood. The training is way above almost what you need for the role, it’s like being back at college!”

Graham Deaves - Health Advisor, IC24

Benefits

IC24 employees can enjoy benefits including the blue light card, NHS Pension Scheme access, and Heartbeat. The blue light card helps bring savings for some of the brands you use. It is the UK’s leading discount provider for the emergency services, NHS, and social care sector - saving money at a wide range of providers from Cineworld to Halfords, Hotpoint, Odean and more.

Heartbeat recognises the hard work of everyone at Integrated Care 24, through peer-to-peer recognition, valuable wellbeing resources and housing your employee discounts. Heartbeat benefits portal is exclusive for all Integrated Care 24 employees.

Why you should choose a career working for IC24 in Ashford

We’ll hand this section over to Gigi Peverell, a nurse who spoke to Matt Farrah at Nurses.co.uk in 2024 about her nursing job in Ashford as a Clinical Advisor at IC24:

“Everyone's very friendly and there's a nice atmosphere - that's a big plus. And they’re very accommodating with people's lifestyles. They're very good with that. That's helped me a great deal. They listen to you as an individual, you know. They take on an individual employee’s personal situation outside of work as well as in. It's not been too much trouble.

“And I've seen this from other colleagues in the office that, you know, it's not too much trouble if you require a certain seat or if you have a disability. IC24 are amazing at providing what you need for work.

“Also in my situation, where I have needed specific hours, it has sometimes been difficult for me to get to the contact centre for various reasons while caring for my elderly mother, especially now I’m the only sibling (and the rest of our family all live overseas).

“IC24 have been so good, so accommodating at changing my schedule, my hours and very understanding with that, ensuring that I get my annual leave for when my mother came out of hospital. That is very rare these days.

“You'd like to think the NHS in general is flexible. There's flexible working. But given the workloads now and the lack of staff it has become impossible for the NHS to provide that for their staff. They do not have the capacity, they don't have the staff.

“So that's a challenge for the NHS in general. But also at IC24, they are also open to new ideas. If you are interested in looking at the system, if you have any new ideas about the queue, for instance, that we're working from the calls, or the way that we pull the calls off the queue - if you have any new ideas about that or anything that you want to bring to the company they're very open to listening to them.”

Practical information about working at our centre in Ashford

Our contact centre in Ashford, is located just off the A2070, close to Junction 10 on the M20. Ashford is in the heart of Kent, and close to the Kent Downs. The south coast is within 30 minutes drive away, with historic towns such as Rye making for beautiful days out. We are just over 1 hour’s train journey from central London making Ashford easily accessible for work for those who do not live in the town.