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Case study:
St Andrews Health Centre
Building a ‘revolutionary’ triage system to improve access and speed up care
Before 2022, long queues would form every morning outside of
St Andrews Health Centre. At the time, patients were frustrated and staff were stressed.
So the practice stepped back to build what’s now a leading system of total triage – a system that resolves 99% of patient requests within 48 hours.
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Impact at a glance:
99% of patient requests
were resolved within 48 hours, with an average response time of 30 minutes
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1,569 appointments
were booked in with Self-Book
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1,860 questionnaires
were completed by patients, giving the team vital information
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2,004 messages
were sent to NHS professionals outside the practice via Accumail
Context: held back by the 8am rush
St Andrews Health Centre covers an ethnically diverse population of 16,000 patients in London. In early 2022, staff were overwhelmed and had no clear system for managing patient requests, which came in by phone, online and in person.
The team offered all the appointments they could and asked any patients who weren’t given an appointment to call back the next day. This resulted in long queues – both on phone lines to reception and outside the practice. GP Partner, Dr Osman Bhatti, described the situation as “a mess that wasn’t good for us or our patients”.
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We used to have a hundred-yard queue outside the surgery at about eight o'clock in the morning. It was like Glastonbury tickets – all appointments were gone within an hour. Patients got fed up with waiting on the phone. The triage and booking system didn’t work well.
Dr Selvaseelan Selvarajah,
St Andrews Health Centre
St Andrews Health Centre
The team use Accurx’s full toolkit to manage patient requests
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Patient Triage and Reception Flow
let the practice funnel all requests into one inbox, ready for the team to action
let the practice funnel all requests into one inbox, ready for the team to action
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Staff can send SMS messages and patient questionnaires to collect data, monitor conditions and meet needs remotely
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Accumail lets staff communicate quickly and easily with other NHS services, without system hopping
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With Self-Book, staff can instantly send patients booking links to take the time out of appointment booking