Helping our heroes help us

Call-4-Help ensures hospital staff can find the resources they need quickly, easily and securely

About

Doctors on the front line living through the Covid-19 crisis every day have asked for a better way to do their jobs. A better way to save lives.

Large numbers of non-ICU specialist health care workers are being very rapidly retrained to work in intensive care units around the world. Communication is a bottleneck, especially when you’re in PPE with patients and can’t enter and leave infected hot areas. People frequently need help within their hospital teams: getting the right equipment where it’s needed, finding the right person to call in, or often just getting questions answered.

Until now that’s often been done with large WhatsApp groups, which can be chaotic, inefficient and potentially unsafe.

With help and guidance from a small group of NHS doctors, three companies from the UK and the US, Kulestar, 4 Roads and Concept Softworks had up to 40 developers working round the clock at no cost to get this specialized app finished in a week.

Call-4-Help improves communications between healthcare professionals within hospitals, making treatment quicker and more efficient. Crucially it also helps to stop the waste of precious PPE by reducing the number of transitions staff have to make in and out of hot areas.

A better way for healthcare professionals to communicate with each other will save lives.

Huge thanks to GoDaddy who donated towards the cost of the domain, and also to Digitalocean for providing the hosting free of charge in support of this initiative.

FAQs

I took ownership of a request, why has it now disappeared?

If you don’t respond or complete a request within a timely manner, the request will be automatically unclaimed to release it for action by other users; you should get a notification before this happens to nudge you to update the request.

Alternatively, the requester could have completed or cancelled the request, which would also remove it from your list.

Why do you need my phone number to log in?

This is sent out in your request for people to hit dial if they prefer to call direct

What is my user name used for?

This is important as the name displayed with your requests/responses should

be your usual name and title, e.g. Dr R Singh, RayJ (Porter)

What is the color coding of requests?

Red means “active and awaiting your response” e.g. Someone has responded to

you.

Yellow means “waiting for someone else” e.g. You replied to a message awaiting response, your request is waiting to be claimed.

What are the little red and yellow numbers on the request list tabs?

Red are number of requests you requested or responded to awaiting your response, yellow are number of requests you requested or responded to where you are waiting for a response.

Does this only work on site at the hospital I registered with?

Yes, it is hospital specific. You can change hospitals in your account settings, under the gear icon in the upper right corner.

What do I do on requests and responses if either party go silent?

You can chat through the App or call directly; if no response is received, the requester can remove the responder and the request will go back on the queue. Likewise, the responder can Unclaim the request to drop off and pass it back to the queue.

There is a timeout mechanism if both parties go silent for 20 minutes after claiming a request without any further

communication or 30 minutes when going silent after the last communication. The request will revert to the queue and each party will be notified accordingly.

Why did my request disappear from the queue?

There is a 1 hour timeout on the queue for request to stop the list overflowing with old/forgotten requests if you have not opened the app to ensure good housekeeping. Opening the app before this time resets all your waiting requests in the queue’s clocks to zero again.

No one answered my request but it’s still valid, how do I renew it before it times out?

Every time you open the app, your requests in the queue are renewed.

Can I send feedback to the App team?

Yes, there is a light bulb icon at the top right of the home screen taking you to a feedback page for bugs, enhancement, ideas and feedback.