Telephone helplines are an effective way of dealing with health related incidents in which large numbers of people need personal counselling or information for reassurance or case finding. Helplines often have to be set up at short notice, which is labour intensive and makes recruitment of appropriate staff difficult. They should ideally be part of local emergency planning resources. Doctors need to be included in the team organising the helpline to ensure that staff are properly briefed, to determine what data need to be collected, and to deal with specialised queries.