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Waiting times on the phone

Story from nhs.uk

"Waiting times on the phone"

About: Lintonville Medical Group

All my family have been patients at Lintonville medical group for many years. Lintonville was an amazing GP surgery, the best in the area, I would have highly recommended them to anyone. Since being taken over by Valens, my experiences of trying to speak to someone has been horrendous. Whilst I understand we have covid and staff shortages I feel that spending 1 hr and 10 minutes on the phone to speak to someone is totally unacceptable. My 82-year-old Mam who has chronic COPD and is suffering from severe hayfever spent 45 minutes waiting for her call to be answered this morning. She gave up in the end. Can I ask do the calls go to a call center? if so can I suggest recruiting more call handlers or go back to the old system. This is not aimed at any Lintonville staff as they are lovely. Seriously this is not good enough Valens !!!

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Responses

Response from Lintonville Medical Group nearly 2 years ago
Lintonville Medical Group

Submitted on 30/07/2023 at 08:01
Published on nhs.uk on 31/07/2023 at 15:55

Dear Ms Sellars

Thank you for taking the time to raise your concerns. We are always sorry to hear when things go wrong for patients, and we strive to make our service better. We will pass on your feedback to staff.

When Lintonville, Brockwell & Wellway merged, we renamed the new group Valens, and we have always tried to maintain the family practice ethic so disappointed to hear that you feel the merging of the practices has adversely effected the performance. The merge has allowed us to offer a wider range of clinical roles to ensure patient care is always at the forefront of everything that we do, whilst demand has risen sharply since Covid. Nevertheless we are conscious that patient access has been a real challenge for us over the last 12 months……

Since your review we have implemented changes to improve access which include:

• Increased the number of staff in the role

• Dedicated additional resource in the peak hour of 0800 – 0900

(this doubles the amount of people on calls to average 20

people taking calls)

• Introduced new shift patterns to better suit demand profile

• Pulled other departments onto Reception when wait times are

too long

We will also be looking to introduce a new system which will include a call back facility.

If you would like to discuss your concerns please call or email our complaints department on 01670 844311/

nencicb-nor.valenscomplaints@nhs.net, and a member of our team will get back to you.

Once again, I am sorry to hear about your bad experience. Please be assured that improving access for patients is a priority for the practice, and we are actively focused on this and will continue to do so.

Kind regards

N Longman

HR & Executive Assistant

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