Playbook, medical practice
Opening hours questions at a GP surgery, answered accurately
A practice has more than one set of hours running at once, and the one a patient needs is rarely the one on the front page. An hours answer here also has a second half, which is what to do while you are closed.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for opening hours holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- A practice usually has several sets of hours at the same time: the building, the telephone lines, the dispensary where there is one, and any evening or weekend clinic held elsewhere.
- Routine closures for staff training are the detail patients are never told and always arrive during, so they belong in the indexed material rather than on a note taped to the door.
- Branch surgeries keep their own hours and their own days, and answering with the main site's times sends somebody to a locked building.
- Every hours answer at a practice needs the closed route attached, because the question is frequently a disguised version of whether somebody can be helped right now.
How it arrives
- what time do you open
- are you open on saturdays
- what time do the phones open
- are you closed on bank holidays
- what time does the branch surgery open
- are you open this afternoon
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Hours for each site you run | The main surgery and every branch, with the days each is open. One page carrying all of them beats a separate page per site that nobody keeps in step. |
|---|---|
| Telephone line hours | When the phones are answered, which is often not the same as when the doors are unlocked. Patients treat these as one thing and they are not. |
| Scheduled training and protected time closures | The afternoons or half days when the practice closes routinely, published in advance rather than announced on the day. |
| What to do when the practice is closed | The out of hours route and the emergency number, exactly as you publish them. Without this the hours answer is accurate and useless. |
The reply
The surgery is open on weekdays, and the telephone lines open earlier than the doors, so the two sets of times are different [1]. The branch site has its own days and they are listed on the same page. We close for staff training on some afternoons and those dates are published in advance. When we are closed, the number to use is on our contact page [2].
It separates the building from the phones, because that is the mistake patients make, and volunteers the branch and the training closures rather than waiting to be asked. It finishes with the closed route so that an answer of no still leaves the patient with somewhere to go.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks whether the surgery can open for them, or says they need to be seen before it opens again.
I can only tell you our published times. If you need help before we open, please use the out of hours number on our contact page, and the emergency number if it is urgent.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never state hours from a general assumption about how surgeries work.
- Never say a particular doctor will be on site at a particular time.
- Never say the practice can fit somebody in outside the published times.
- Never give one site's hours as though they applied to all of them.
Questions
- Why does this go wrong so often?
- Because practices publish hours in several places and update one of them. Point the assistant at the page you actually maintain, and remove or fix the others, or it will quote whichever it finds.
- Should it mention the out of hours number every time?
- Whenever the practice is closed or about to be, yes. An hours question asked in the evening is nearly always a question about tonight.
- Can it handle a one off closure?
- Only if the closure is in the material it reads. A notice added to a page it crawls will be picked up when that page is indexed again, so plan the update rather than assuming it appears instantly.
Keep reading
- Everything for a medical practiceAdministrative questions a practice can safely automate, the symptom questions it must never touch, and how to word the refusal.
- Handling opening hours in generalHolidays, seasonal variation, last orders and multiple sites. Keeping one source of truth so the assistant and your map listing agree.
- What a surgery assistant should say about access needsStep free routes, interpreters, accessible formats and longer appointments. Access questions at a practice are a duty.
- Handling a request to delete or correct a medical recordMedical records cannot simply be erased. Explaining deletion, corrections and where a formal request has to go.
- Getting a patient off the chat and onto the right numberAt a practice the handover is a routing decision between three numbers, and the assistant is not the thing that routes.
Try it on your own material
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