Telephone Improvements

At City Walls, we listen to our patients and strive to improve our services wherever possible.

Our patient participation group (PPG) holds regular meet and greet sessions at the practice to gather patient feedback. They collect both negative and positive feedback.

This allows us to get a better understanding of any problems and clarifies if our recent changes have led to improvements.

We discuss any areas of concern with the PPG to come up with better solutions for our patients.

A Common Problem

After a recent meet and greet exercise, we met to discuss a common theme from the feedback. Patients reported that there was difficulty getting through on the telephone in the morning.

The PPG suggested that we try staggering the appointment release times throughout the day. The idea was that it would take the pressure off the telephones first thing in the morning.

After further discussions with the partners, we made the bold decision to change the way we handle calls to book appointments.

The Solution

We now release urgent ‘on the day’ appointments at 8am and routine appointments at 10am.

Routine appointments are pre-bookable and are available up to a week in advance. They are also available to book online via Patient Access. Please see reception or our online services section to get your log in details.

To maximise the impact of the changes we ran a marketing campaign for one month before the go-live date. This was to ensure that as many patients as possible were aware of the changes that were going to take place. As of October 1st, 2016 we went live.

Early indications and feedback from a further meet and greet exercise have been positive. The majority of patients have welcomed the change.