A House of Lords report to be released tomorrow is widely expected to criticise the government for being slow in setting up the swine flu helpline that was eventually launched on Thursday. The Lords report attacks ministers for not following the set timetable for setting up the phone line, after a variety of newspaper reports suggested that the delay was caused in ministerial and inter-departmental infighting.
The Science and Technology paper will say that ministers failed to still to the timetable they set fir themselves for informing and advising the public. In 2005 the committee recommended that te government needed to make it a priority to ensure that they prioritised access to information uin the event of a pandemic.
The Hotline was launched so patients can get advice, diagnosis and treatment without going to their GP’s surgery. Within an hour of the website going online, it was receiving 2.600 hits per second. The website has proved more popular than the phoneline, with 80% of the 58,000 assessment completed in first day being done online.
When patients are diagnosed with the virus, they are given a unique reference code that their ‘flu buddy’ can use to go and pick up a prescription from the dispatch centre.
Ministers have hit back at claims that they took too long to get the information services up and running, with Gillian Merron, health minister, saying that the service could only be launched when the infection had moved past local outbreaks to significant levels of infection across the country.