Whitley House Surgery

Eliminating the Engaged Tone

August 2022

Whitley House Surgery provides healthcare services to 14,000 patients in Chelmsford, Essex.

August 2022

The Challenge

For Amy Winter, Practice Manager at Whitley House Surgery, the primary challenge was "just constantly having the engaged tone. People trying to call in, and for us trying to dial out, because we had limited lines."

Additionally "not having a homework solution with our old system, or do any diverting, that was a nightmare."

Amy was also looking for SystmOne integration. Her team wanted the "big advantage of incoming calls opening up the patients' records."

The Solution

Surgery Connect provides practices with unlimited lines in and out. Queue lengths are only dictated by reception capacity. Sophisticated reporting ensures practice administration deploy resources as effectively as possible, resulting in patients not only not receiving an engaged tone, but being connected as quickly as possible. Routing options are easily configured using the X-flow, the graphical call flow interface, ensuring patients also reach the optimal destination.

Call Recording

Call recording also allows practice administration to review calls for both staff training and dispute resolution. As Amy relates: "for us, it's been really useful to hear both sides of the conversations when there's been any incidents, because it gives you a much clearer picture of what's going on. And it also gives us loads of leverage with the patients if we say 'We've listened to that call, and the way you spoke to reception was completely unacceptable.'

"It's been so useful when we've had patients complaining about staff, and also when staff have complained about patients, just to be able to hear. Also a couple of clinical calls from the triage perspective.

"It has picked up some training issues with some of our newer receptionists because the patients have gone 'Well, they just weren't listening', or 'They were abrupt.' And when you listen, you think 'You know what? I think you're right.' You realise reception could have asked another couple of questions of the patient that possibly would've helped to get to the bottom of what was needed, rather than quite early on in the conversation saying 'I don't think we can help today.' So it has been good."

Patient Callback

Patient Callback allows patients to leave the call queue and be called back when they would have reached the front of the queue: "What's nice is you can't avoid calling them back because the system calls them back anyway. There's nothing to remember or forget."