Are health visitors just not bothered?

[Kibble29]

I have a 3 year old that I have a bit of a concern about - nothing major or urgent; it’s something in relation to their communication.

On Monday, I called the HV as I wanted to get their opinion on it, to see if it was something typical for my child’s age or if they had any advice in dealing with it at home.

Call went straight to voicemail. It’s not the HV’s own work mobile, just the health visitor contact number. I left a message with my child’s details, my name, my contact number and said that I had a concern I’d like to get some advice about.

No reply. Called again a couple of days later, went through the same message as above and said (in a friendly tone) that this was the second message I’d left. Again, no contact from their side.

Tried again yesterday. They’re open until 5pm, I called at 4pm and they’d turned the voicemail off so I couldn’t even leave a message.

We never really have a need for the HV to see us as my child has just never required it.

Is this sort of poor communication normal, in your experience? I didn’t leave any details about the nature of my concern, so they have no idea what my call was about. It seems like very poor service.

To be fair Monday was a bank holiday so this is a 4 day week, you haven’t left any details so it’s fair for them to assume it’s non-urgent and so when they review and organise their call backs in order of priority you’re going to be back of the list.

It’s difficult to give detail but Monday wasn’t a holiday for the NHS in my area. All at work as normal. The NHS here gave up certain BHs as part of their pay deal, and Monday was one of them. I work in the same Trust so I know we were all business as usual.

Fair enough if I’m wrong RE the callback timescale though, I have little experience of how fast you’d expect a call back.

In some areas the universal service has been significantly downgraded and the focus is on at risk and deprived areas.

if you’ve not stated the concern they’ll assume non urgent.

Even so, they get a lot of calls and lots of them are very clearly urgent, parents of brand new babies having feeding issues, MH issues flagging post birth and needing support, contact about illnesses/safeguarding/urgent guidance on things, you’ve left a generic message with no detail and no urgency, I’d safely assume you can wait beyond all the people who have left a message explaining exactly what help they need + especially those with very tiny babies whereby even hours make a huge difference.

That’s fair, you’re right about all of that. Fair enough.