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

National suicide prevention strategies are general population-based approaches to prevent suicide by promoting help-seeking behaviors 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 within each of the United Kingdom's 4 countries or regions. The aim of this study was to identify any differences in call duration across the helpline service in order to determine whether service varied interregionally and intraregionally and to determine the impact of calls answered in the same region as the caller, compared with calls answered in a different region on the duration of calls made from landlines to Samaritans UK. Calls may be routed by Samaritans, wherein 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 (intraregional calls) or routed to a branch that is in a different region from that of the caller's current region (interregional calls). The origin of calls by region was identified using the landline prefix of the anonymized caller identifier, along with the region of the destination branch (as branch details are recorded in the call details record). First, a Levene's test of homogeneity of variance was carried out for each condition, that is, England calls and Scotland calls. Thereafter, for each condition, a one-way ANOVA or one-way analysis of means was carried out to evaluate any significant differences in call duration. ANOVA results showed that there are significant differences in call durations between intraregional calls and interregional calls (P