TV4 Nyheterna has been in contact with several nurses who tell about how they are pressured to keep conversations under six minutes.
– When a call comes in, a clock starts ticking that you can see all the time while you are talking to the caller. It becomes an inner stress to finish the conversation before the clock ticks over six minutes. Then there is a risk of being careless in order to come to a quick end, says a nurse at 1177 in Region Stockholm.
She talks about a stressful system where everything is logged and measured to reach the time target.
– In the system, you get a summary where you can see exactly how long talk time you had on different categories of calls. If you are above the average time, the numbers become gray instead of green. Then you get a call from your boss that things don’t look good and that you talked for too long. I get shit because the call was long, even though I gave the caller good advice, she says.
The average time is checked
Several employees and former employees of 1177 in the region testify to the same thing. None of them dares to tell openly.
– They are stubborn if you don’t reach the goals. They check your average time every day and every week. If you have too long conversations, you are called to a meeting with your boss, says a nurse.
– I have never felt so monitored at a workplace before. It’s a terrible pressure to last six minutes regardless of patient. If you have an average time of eight minutes, you feel completely worthless, says another.
According to the nurses we have been in contact with, measurements regarding whether the meal has been reached are something that is brought up in employee interviews and assessments regarding extensions of temporary work.
The region: There are no consequences
Region Stockholm states that employees are not evaluated in relation to the meal and that there are no consequences or rewards for the nurses based on the length of the calls.
– It is very important that you can have a good dialogue with your immediate boss. If it doesn’t work, you can always contact your boss’s boss. After all, the Stockholm region has high requirements that it should be accessible for the residents to get to 1177, says Christoffer Bernsköld, who is head of the department for local health care at the health and medical care administration.
You can compare Region Halland, where there is no fixed ceiling and the nurses are estimated to take approximately four calls per hour. Professor Inger K Holmström at Mälardalen University has long studied healthcare counseling over the phone. She says that there is no research support for setting a goal of exactly six minutes.
Although it is possible to give advice on simpler symptoms at that time.
– The conversations have such a different character. It can be conversations where you talk to someone who may be suicidal, someone who has language difficulties or perhaps an elderly person who has many and vague symptoms. Such a conversation must be allowed to take time, says Inger K Holmström, professor of care science at Mälardalen University.