Retrospective analysis of phone queries to an epilepsy clinic hotline

We undertook a retrospective study of 5,189 telephone calls made between January 2004 and June 2011 through our adult epilepsy clinic hotline to a single epileptologist initially and two epileptologists from June 2010 onwards. The majority of calls were made by patients themselves (72%), followed by family members (16%) and health care providers (11%). Half of the calls originated from outside the city limits. Most were related to medication (25%), notification of seizures (23%), appointments or tests (12%), and side effects (9%). Half of the workload was generated by 10% of patients. The hotline service appears to respond to needs, with most calls requiring rapid intervention. It is desirable to develop novel approaches to address the needs of high-frequency callers.