Our shifts used to cover the hours from 7.30am to 8pm, but we are now assisting on nights too.

When the team expanded, we were moved to a different office so we could work whilst remaining 2 metres away from our colleagues. Our IT and maintenance teams created a make-shift office for us out of one of our meeting rooms and this allows us to work safely together.

On an average day we can take 100 or so calls. These can come from many different sources: a patient known to SinglePoint; or a member of their family; a GP or other clinician from a surgery; consultants and specialist nurses from hospitals or other hospices; community nurses; paramedics; and nursing/residential homes; and there are many more, but the bulk of the calls come from this list.

Every call is different and often with a family - especially when patient is nearing end of life, they can be very emotional. It is really important we make the caller aware that we aren't clinically trained and we try to ascertain the reason for the call by just asking a few questions, then we have to log the call on the system and code it under our red, amber and green system.