text: New NHS data released this week showed that telephone calls to NHS 111 were up by more than a third compared with the same time last year, with an extra 120,000 calls to NHS 111 in the first week of March. Between Thursday 27 February and Thursday 5 March, NHS 111 answered 389,779 calls. To help deal with this demand, the NHS have announced around 500 additional initial call responders have already been trained, an increase of 20%, and people can also visit NHS 111 online.