New Phone Number Posted or Updated on 12 Jul 2023

Dear Patients,

I wrote several open letters recently to provide an update on the problems we, and many other local surgeries, were experiencing with our telephone system. At the time I explained how the current telephone system was provided by a central IT body for most local practices and unfortunately that system had not been upgraded in many years and was no longer fit for purpose. Despite our best endeavours, we were unable to resolves these issues with the supplier and therefore we had to seek our own, independent resolution to the problem.

After much hard work and negotiating with many different suppliers, at significant cost to the practice, we appointed a new supplier in January 2023 and since then, they have been working to setup and install a new, fit for purpose, telephone system. I am pleased to say that work is now reaching a conclusion and at 10am on the 15th March our new telephone system will go live. Unfortunately, we have not been able to take our existing phone number with us, so from 10am on 15th March 2023, our phone number will be;

01257 441 771

The new system comes with a lot of additional functionality which should improve the patient experience and make the process of contacting us much easier. Some of the highlights are;

• Unlimited queueing – Patients should never hear an engaged tone again or a “failed to connect call” message.
• Virtual queuing – If there are more than 10 people in the call queue, patients will have the option to join a virtual queue. By following the simple instructions, their place will be reserved in the queue and then they can hang up and carry on doing their daily routine. When their call reaches the front of the queue, the system will automatically ring them back and connect them to the next available receptionist.
• Number recognition – When patients ring the surgery the new system will match their phone number with their patient record and pull up the correct details for the receptionist, this should enable a quicker and smoother experience for patients.
• Detailed call reports – Both real time data and detailed weekly and monthly reports will now be available to the management team, meaning we can better monitor and identify peak periods and look to redeploy staff accordingly.

As I’m sure you can appreciate a project of this size and scale has taken a lot of effort and hard work to reach this stage and I would like to take the opportunity to thank my staff who have both been working with a dated system and who have been working so hard on this project. It has perhaps taken longer than we would have liked to implement this system, but I am sure this new system will be worth the wait and provide a much-improved patient experience.

Like all new systems, there may be some initial teething problems and I would ask patients to be understanding as this new system is launched.  I would also like to encourage patients to continue to make use of online access to perform routine tasks like making an appointment, ordering a prescription, or viewing a lab result.

Yours faithfully

Craig Lee
Business Manager


For and on behalf of Library House Surgery