Talk Time Differences Between Interregional and Intraregional Calls to a Crisis Helpline: Statistical Analysis

Abstract

Background: National suicide prevention strategies are general population-based approaches to prevent suicide by promoting help-seeking behaviours and implementing interventions. Crisis helplines are one of the suicide prevention resources available for public use where individuals experiencing a crisis can talk to a trained volunteer. Samaritans UK operates on a national scale, with a number of branches located in within each of the UK’s four countries or regions. Objective: The aim of this study is to identify any differences in call duration across the helpline service in order to see if service varied interregionally and /or intraregionally; and to determine the impact of calls answered in the same region as the caller, compared to calls answered in a different region on the duration of calls made from landlines to Samaritans UK. Methods: Calls may be routed in Samaritans, the telephony system sends the call to the next available volunteer, irrespective of location, therefore individuals may be routed to a branch within the same region as the caller’s current region (intra-regional calls) or routed to a branch that is in a different region from that of the caller’s current region (inter-regional calls). The origin of calls by region was identified using the landline prefix of the anonymised caller identifier, along with the region of the destination branch (as branch is recorded in the call details record). Results: Firstly, a Levene’s test of homogeneity of variance was carried out for each condition i.e. England calls, Scotland calls. Again at each condition, a One-way ANOVA/One-way analysis of means was carried out to look at for any significant differences in call duration, which showed that there are significant differences in call durations between intraregional calls and interregional calls (p<0.001). Across all conditions within this study, callers stayed on the phone for a shorter period of time when routed to a branch that is within the same region as the call origin, than if they were put through to a branch within a different region than the call origin. Conclusions: Statistical analyses showed that there were significant differences between interregional and intraregional calls. On average, callers to crisis helplines stayed on the phone for a shorter amount of time if they were routed to a branch within the same region in which the call originated, than if they were routed to a branch in a different region of origin. The findings from this study have practical applications which may allow crisis helplines to manage their resources more effectively and improve caller satisfaction with the service. Clinical Trial: Not applicable