The new telephony system is now officially live at Marston Forest Healthcare and all is working extremely well (she says and doesn’t want to jinx it).

There is now no longer a telephone queue limit in comparison to our previous provider only allowing 25 patients in the queue at any one time.

Please note that this unfortunately does not guarantee you an appointment if you call at 8.30am, however, this will improve your experience of getting into the telephone queue whereby you will only need to call the surgery on one attempt to enter the telephone queue as opposed to multiple unsuccessful attempts.

Within our telephone queuing system, we have prioritised those clinically urgent calls from external services such as NHS111, Palliative Care Hub Nurses, Radiology with urgent reports for action, Paramedics etc. These callers will jump to the front of the telephone queue regardless of how many patients are in the calling queue at any one time. Please be aware of this as your call may jump down if a priority caller was to come in front of you.

As mentioned previously, there are lots of other great features that the new telephony provider can offer which we will look to explore in the near future.

Our opening hours remain the same for routine calls and all patients are still encouraged to call late afternoon for any routine test results.

All other operational and clinical aspects remain the same and we hope that our patients have a more positive experience of reaching one of our administration team when calling through to the surgery moving forward.