New Phone System
Our telephone system when it was installed over 3 years ago was good at the time. However, since the pandemic, traffic has increased we estimate by 2.5 to 3 times the normal traffic, dependent on days. This has obviously been for multiple reasons. It is our sole method of communication as patients haven’t been able to walk into the surgery. However, more recently there has been an increase in the number of patient contacts as we come out of the pandemic, and significantly there has been a lot of contact with the Practice to enquire about the Covid vaccination programme, although we have tried to ask patients not to call specifically about this.
This has led to long call waits, but also reports from patients that they could get down the queue and then just become cut off, or when ringing just getting the engaged tone. We did log this with the phone company but they seemed to tell us that there was no problem with the phones.
It has unfortunately been difficult for us to react in the sense of changing our phone system. However, we did take the decision to terminate the phone contract and install a new one. Unfortunately this has taken longer than we had hoped, but as of the week beginning 26th April, we have had a completely new phone system installed which is something called a cloud based system. This gives us unlimited call queueing so there should be no more engaged tone. It also gives us some immediate and retrospective feedback on call data in that we can see how long people are waiting and how long we are taking to handle the calls. It also gives us some idea of what the numbers of calls are at peak times.
We clearly realise that it is going to take more than this to improve the experience of patients on the phones and we have put a plan in place to have significantly increased numbers of staff answering the phones, both by redeploying existing staff, particularly at peak times, but also there is a plan in place to employ a significant increase in the number of reception staff to answer the phones. We plan to performance manage the call handling at the practice using the real time data that the new system will supply, and we as Partners and the Management Team are going to hold weekly meetings looking at our access issues and how we may improve. We will obviously in due course be reopening the surgery in line with national guidance so that patients can walk in and book appointments in person, which will relieve some of the pressure. However, we have to follow the guidance from the CCG and make sure that we do this when the situation is safe to allow this.
We will also with immediate effect be reinstating the internet booking of appointments for a proportion of our appointments. We are going to complete a complete overhaul of our website, particularly with clarified instructions over complaints, but also try and add a degree of sign posting so that patients can be aware of how to self-manage simple conditions. In fact we have a Physiotherapist who can diagnose simple musculoskeletal disorders and we have a Pharmacist who can call patients back about medication queries etc.