July 2021
Wells Park Practice is a busy Sydenham, inner London, practice serving over 12,500 patients. Wells Park Practice maintain a Patient Participation Group that meet regularly and provide feedback from a patient perspective.
The Challenge
Wells Park Practice, though largely happy with their existing telephone system, were struggling with providing the best patient call experience. As Antonia Makinde, non-clinical Managing Partner, explains: "we have been struggling with telephone access for a long time, not from lack of trying. We had a telephone service, which was very good, they're very responsive, but it just didn't meet our needs. We just kept having negative reviews regarding our telephones."
Wells Park Practice wanted to be able to monitor call activity in real-time, allowing them to correctly allocate resources and minimise the difficulties patients were facing getting through to the practice.
The Solution
Antonia supports other GP practices as part of various roles she holds and "found out about Surgery Connect through a practice I was supporting."
Surgery Connect includes comprehensive call and resource monitoring facilities, real-time via wallboards and user interfaces, and downloadable reports providing granular breakdown of all call handling statistics. Call Recording was also a feature Antonia could utilise to improve the patient call experience: "The wallboard gave live performance for call monitoring, and also we can record our calls for training and monitoring."
Patient Callback allows patients to choose to hold their position in the call queue, receiving a call from the practice when they've reached the front of the queue. Antonia had "been talking to the telephone company we had before to see whether that could be introduced, but we didn't get anywhere. That'd been going on for nearly two years." Surgery Connect includes Patient Callback, so as a patient "you can call, keep your place in the queue and do what you're doing and then we'll call you back", an important feature for Antonia.
Antonia introduced the team at Wells Park Practice to three different telephony systems, and "at the end it was unanimously agreed that Surgery Connect was the best. Once we made our decision we liked the way we were kept involved, kept updated in terms of progress. It was seamless."
Wells Park Practice Says
"Staff love the system.
"X-on were very responsive to our needs right from the presentation to sign up, and implement was a very smooth process. They kept us informed throughout.
"All in all a very good system."
Antonia Makinde
Non-clinical Managing Partner
Wells Park Practice
wellsparkpractice.co.uk
For further information on Surgery Connect please call Sales on 0333 332 0000.
