Heartbeat: Community contact centre leads the way in improving patient communications

September 12, 2018

Every year we send a colossal amount of post to patients who are eagerly awaiting appointments, results and referrals. However thanks to an innovation in the community contact centre, the team are leading the way in embedding the use of email in patient contact.

To learn more about what the team are doing, Heartbeat caught up with Lucille Hedges, Community Contact Centre Lead.

She said: “We are the single central point of contact for eight community services in and for a long while now have been looking to see what we could do to develop how we manage our patient correspondence.

“We take approximately 16,500 calls a month; processing referrals, booking and rescheduling appointments, many of which lead to notification being sent to the patient.  Traditionally this has always been a letter being posted but since a high number of our patients now have a smart phone, we began looking into emailing our letters directly to patients.”

The community contact centre took the decision to embark on collecting patient email addresses as part of our organisation’s digital strategy for electronic communication to patients.  This process also involved asking the patients to undertake an electronic verification process on the community patient administration system, SystmOne provided by TPP.

The service also lobbied TPP to enable attachments to be included in the email which means patients can receive their outcome letters electronically.

The new processes mean we’ll soon not only be saving time in not having to print, pack and post all of the letters we generate, but we’ll also be saving a significant amount of money spent on processing outcome letters.

To bring the new vision to life, the community contact centre team has pledged to ask each and every patient they come in to contact with for their email address, adding to their already healthy total of approximately 12,000 patients who will soon be moving from snail mail to email.

To find out more about the work that the community contact centre are doing, email Lucille Hedges on lucille.hedges@nhs.net