Our free helpline offers a friendly, informative service to everyone across all four nations of the UK.  We offer guidance and support on health and social care matters. 

About the helpline

You may want to know if you can get a second opinion about your condition, or how to change your GP or your dentist. You may want to make a complaint, find out what is written in your medical records or find out if we have encountered a specific problem before. If we can’t help you, the likelihood is that we will know someone who can.

Please note our staff are not medically trained and cannot give medical or legal advice. For medical advice please call 111 or 999 in case of emergency.

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How our national freephone helpline can help you

Our helpline provides specialist information and guidance across all four UK nations to help you make sense of the world of health and social care.

Our helpline covers all of health and social care, and you can contact us about your experiences in the NHS, private healthcare, and social care systems. Whether your experience has been positive or one that could have been better, we’d like to hear more and see what we can do to help.

Our helpline team also work closely with Language is Everything which enables ‘real time’ conversations, certified written translations and appointments which are bookable at a convenient time, during our helpline opening hours.

Our team want to help you, and although we understand that our callers may be experiencing challenging situations, we have a zero tolerance policy against unacceptable behaviour. We have a duty of care to our staff and volunteers to provide them with a healthy and supportive workplace. Aggressive and/or abusive behaviour, including threatening comments, bad language or aggressive gestures will not be tolerated. Should any of these behaviours take place then the team will ask the caller to stop and if it persists, they will terminate the call and raise an internal incident through our processes.

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Helpline opening hours

You can call our helpline on 0800 345 7115 (freephone) between Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 5pm.

Our staff provide free and confidential information and guidance and are happy to answer your questions. 

Voice messages left outside of these times will be dealt with during business hours if you leave your phone number.

Email the helpline

You can send us an email to: [email protected] Please do not send attachments with your email as these will not be read due to security measures. We aim to respond within 5 working days.

If you would like to help spread the word about how our helpline can help others, please download and print our poster here 

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Helplines Partnership

The Patients Association is a member of Helplines Partnership, the membership body for organisations that provide helpline services. The Partnership provides various services for helplines including training and a quality standard. This benefits our helpline team in providing the best possible service to patients getting in touch with us.

As a registered charity, the Patients Association is dependent upon donations and sponsorship to be able to continue operating the helpline. You can see a full list of our supporters here.