A Birmingham hospital has been criticised for its slow response to answering incoming calls.

Selly Oak Hospital was highlighted in new research which shows two out of three hospitals fail to answer incoming calls within 20 seconds and there are wide variations across England.

Fifty hospitals took more than a minute on average to answer calls made to switchboards while one hospital in Bristol took more than 18 minutes to answer one call.

Experts called for a nationwide target for answering such calls, which they said could be about emergencies or major incidents.

For the study, researchers made calls to the switchboards of 219 acute trusts with A&E departments. They set a target of 20 seconds, in line with some organisations outside the NHS, including police forces, councils and universities. The authors made a total of three calls on three specific week days and at three specific times.

All hospital switchboards were telephoned from a private (non-hospital) line with the total number of calls being 657.

Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM), the authors said: “We found a vast discrepancy in actual answering times and the consistency of answering times throughout hospitals.

“The average answering time was 45 seconds. The best performing switchboard was University Hospital of North Durham and the worst Bristol Royal Infirmary.

“Selly Oak Hospital also performed poorly, being not only near the bottom of the league table, but also remarkably consistent in its slow answering times.

“Five switchboards gave engaged tones, hung up or ‘timed out’ at some stage; 71 (32 per cent) of switchboards use an automated answering system, which added a mean of 23 seconds (range 19-65 seconds) to the answering time from an operator, due mainly to the length of the recorded message – resulting in added cost to callers.”

The authors said an engaged tone or “time out” was “unacceptable for an emergency service”.

They added: “The hospital switchboard lies at the heart of the NHS, playing a critical role without which the NHS would come to a standstill. The NHS should introduce a formal, system-wide audit for switchboard response times, publishing its findings on a regular basis and covering all hospitals.”