How fast is fast enough? An audit and league table of response times of acute hospital NHS Trust switchboards in England.

Objective: To audit response times by all acute NHS hospital switchboards in England for external incoming calls. As with any audit, we set out to draw attention to efficiencies and deficiencies in the system, highlight problems, and suggest the first steps towards improving standards in a very important and poorly acknowledged part of our healthcare system.

Design: Telephone calls were made to hospital switchboards, and time to response was measured.