We had to change our working practices overnight, we were used to dealing with a large quantity of calls however the volume of calls increased dramatically. Patients were requiring Covid advice, and then all appointments were initially being carried out over the telephone via a triage, we simply did not have the capacity on our existing telephone system to deal with the demand.
The home working option offers both practices greater resilience, should we ever need to close again, or staff are required to isolate, we have a tried and tested solution in place. Staff can simply take their handsets home as its plug and play or work effectively too using just the mob app. This has offered us such flexibility recently.
GP surgeries are busy by nature but now with many of our doctors doing triage over the phone, the lines had never been busier. Rather than losing any calls, we can set up call queues so patients can wait in a queue until someone comes available and are kept fully informed throughout the call. We now have the flexibility to set up rules on this.