After-hours phone cover for home care in Cork.

Hettie works for the provider. The HSE office is the one that approves and commissions home support hours; your agency delivers them. The HSE home support offices that serve the area are Cork (South Lee and West Cork) (St Finbarr's Hospital, Douglas Road, Cork T12 XH60, telephone 021 492 3864); Cork (North Cork and North Lee) (Mallow Primary Care Centre, Goulds Hill, Mallow, telephone 022 587 49). Hettie does not take referrals from the office or change what it commissions. It answers your line out of hours, makes welcome and satisfaction calls to your clients, and writes up every call so you have a record to show the HSE or HIQA.

None directly: Hettie is not connected to hospital systems. Post-discharge calls go to your own clients, from the list you give it. The acute hospitals nearest the area on the HSE list are Cork University Hospital, Mercy University Hospital and South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital, so those are the discharges an agency here is most likely to see. When a client comes home from one of them, you add them to the Post-Discharge Follow-up programme (€3 per active patient per month), and Hettie rings in the days that follow and flags to your coordinator anything that has slipped.

Hettie answers first, in your agency's name, and says it is an automated assistant. Four escalation levels decide what happens next. Information and attention go into your morning summary. Urgent and emergency reach a person at minute 0: an urgent call is transferred live to your on-call nurse or manager, and for an emergency Hettie tells the caller to ring 112 or 999 and alerts your on-call team at the same time. The person who picks up is someone on your own rota. SouthDoc is the out-of-hours GP service for the area if the caller needs a doctor, and Hettie does not give medical advice.

Hettie's Care Centre is designed to go live in 24 hours once the data processing agreement is signed. You hold a kick-off call about branches, on-call rota and what counts as urgent, send a spreadsheet of clients and numbers, run test calls with your team, then forward your after-hours line. There is no setup fee and no integration is needed to start. Early access is open to providers in Ireland, so ask about the pilot when you request a demo.

Client details, transcripts and call write-ups are stored and processed in the European Union. Health data is special category data under Article 9 of the GDPR, and Hettie acts as your processor under a signed data processing agreement. We say the EU because that is what we can state today. Ask us about the hosting location when you request a demo.