"Terrible"

I am sorry that you had a long wait to be answered on the phone. As you were kind enough to leave your name, I did attempt to trace details of your call on our telephone reports system, but can not find a patient by your name on our patient list, so am wondering whether perhaps you may be known by a different name at the surgery or have perhaps left your comment on the wrong surgery comments page. Anyway, as I cannot trace details of your call, I will instead leave brief report of our calls stats for today, which show that of the of the 853 calls made to the reception desk today, 673 of these were answered. 180 callers gave up prior to being answered and the longest any of these callers waited before giving up was 38 minutes 28 seconds. 26 of these callers gave up within 10 seconds. Our patient list is increasing and this does impact on the waiting time for calls to be answered, as we have more patients calling in at the same time with limited numbers of reception staff available to respond. We are therefore seeking to address this by installing additional workstations so that we will be able to hire additional receptionists to answer calls, so please bear with us, as this process does take some time. In the meantime, we apologise to anyone kept waiting on the phone. Are you aware that the new phone system does offer you the chance to receive an automatic call back after you have waited for ten minutes without being answered? Some of our patients are taking advantage of this option. It works by holding your place in the queue and automatically calling you back once your call is close to the front of the queue. Perhaps this will help save some people hanging on until their call is answered.