Staff training call handlers for NHS 111 had their eyebrows threaded during teaching sessions and helped trainees cheat in their qualifying exams, it has been claimed.
Trainees were allegedly left alone for hours at a time by their tutors who 'ran around with their phones like silly teenagers' and constantly made sexual jokes.
At the end of the course, it was alleged that struggling trainees were given the answers in the medical exam, enabling 'utterly incompetent' people to qualify as 'Health Advisors' and handle life-or-death calls from the public.
The claims were made by a whistleblower who told MailOnline the six weeks of training offered to frontline medical staff was 'like a term at Grange Hill'.
'Everyone was having a whale of a time, but it made me furious because it was so serious,' said the 59-year-old. 'Nobody learned anything. Their attitude will inevitably lead to deaths.'
Allegations of slapdash training come just weeks after a a six-year-old boy died in Plymouth when his father failed to get proper medical help despite spending six hours phoning the hotline.
'I'm not surprised at all,' the MailOnline source said. 'The 111 number is put on the back of ambulances. The public is told to rely on it.
'Call handlers make important decisions based on symptoms they hear over the phone, and direct patients down the right medical pathways.
'It's a complete dereliction of duty to push untrained, foolhardy staff into dealing with potentially life-or-death calls.'
The whistleblower applied for the part-time, £8.60-per-hour position at the medical hotline in March after a career in sales.
She was amazed to be offered a job after one brief telephone conversation, without even a face-to-face interview.
'I could have been a serial killer,' she said. 'I got the job within a few hours of applying. The phone call was a total joke and only lasted 10 minutes. They'd take anyone.'
She was enrolled into a six-week training programme in Milton Keynes and was appalled by the poor quality of the 15 trainees in her group.
'Clearly they hadn't vetted applicants properly,' she said. 'One man had a visual impairment and struggled to read the computer screen.
'He spent the whole time listening to his headphones and bopping away and nobody minded.
'Many of the trainees were fashion students who had no intention of continuing in the job once their courses started.
'One woman was five months pregnant and homeless. There were no standards. The environment was like a noisy, daft playground and it was hardly possible to learn at all.'
The two male trainers arrived 35 minutes late and immediately started making crude jokes and using foul language, she said.
'It was like the set of the Jeremy Kyle Show,' she added, 'not a serious medical facility with a professional, concentrated atmosphere. We nicknamed the trainers Dumb and Dumber.'
One of the trainers - Robert O'Leary - was bawdy and inappropriate for the whole six weeks, the whistleblower said.
'He called himself a 'big fat fairy' and made jokes about how he kept his phone in his breast pocket because it made his nipple vibrate,' she said.
'He joked about sexual acts with a cucumber and his sex life with his boyfriend. He told us to refer to a patient's a***hole rather than their rectum.
'He kept going on about his phobia of bananas. It was like a foul-mouthed standup routine or a cabaret act.
'I felt really anxious because I didn't want to be responsible for taking a call when I'd been taught absolutely nothing.
'I kept thinking, this is 111. Nobody has learnt anything at all. Do people not realise how serious it is? I was expecting Ricky Gervais or Candid Camera to appear.'
Seventy-five per cent of the day, she said, was spent 'messing about' while the staff chatted, played on their phones or went out to cafes leaving trainees alone.
Then they were given a 'distance learning pack' and told to read complex medical material in their own time. 'Of course nobody bothered apart from me,' she said.
'When we watched videos, the trainers let people lie on the floor as if they were in their bedrooms. They all spent a whole afternoon getting their eyebrows threaded in the classroom.
During the final medical exam, the trainers walked up and down the room helping students with their questions, the source said.
'When they got their answers wrong, the staff helped them correct them so they could pass,' she said. 'People were being coached step-by-step through the exam. I was fuming.
'They were putting people through who didn't have a clue.'
Afraid that she had not received adequate training to do the job properly, the whistleblower decided to resign.
When she raised her concerns with the NHS, she was 'not taken seriously'.
'This is how taxpayers' money is being spent,' she said.
'When you call 111 and reach a Health Advisor, you expect them to have some medical training.
'You don't expect to speak to a badly-trained idiot.
'It's a total waste of NHS resources and a danger to the public. In the end, these people have blood on their hands.'
A spokesman for Conduit Global, the private company that provides the NHS 111 training in Milton Keynes, said: ‘Conduit Global operates a comprehensive training program in adherence to NHS Pathways requirements with a rigorous governance framework in alignment with the standards of the CQC.
‘We take matters concerning the general public and the delivery of our service extremely seriously and therefore we have immediately launched an investigation to look into these allegations.
‘Conduit Global is 100 per cent committed to patient safety and any substantiation to the allegations will be addressed immediately.’
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