EXAMPLE news story 1 [DELETE]

Healthwatch Hackney visited Allerton Road Medical Centre in June and September 2025 to assess patient experience and service quality. Findings show mixed feedback on appointment booking and reception interactions, with long waits linked to patient preference for familiar GPs. Accessibility challenges include limited translation support and English-only check-in systems. While staff culture is described as “family-like,” clearer governance is needed. Recommendations include improving communication, strengthening interpreter services, enhancing feedback visibility, and supporting continuity of care. The practice has committed to implementing these changes to ensure patient-centred improvements and better accessibility for vulnerable groups.

Healthwatch Hackney conducted an Enter and View visit to Stamford Hill Group Practice on 29 March 2023 to assess accessibility, service quality, and patient experience. The practice serves over 17,300 patients, offers same-day GP appointments, and provides additional services such as physiotherapy, mental health support, and social prescribing. Observations highlighted good accessibility features but noted issues like tied emergency cords and limited wheelchair space. Patient feedback revealed long phone waits, difficulty booking appointments, and mixed experiences with reception staff. Recommendations include improving communication, offering advance bookings, enhancing cultural awareness training, and better signposting of services. The practice responded positively to most suggestions.

It was apparent from the feedback Healthwatch Hackney receives residents, that many were complaining about how difficult is was to get through to their GP practice. For example, many said they were kept waiting for a long time for their call to get answered, and that this was impacting on their ability to access primary health care.

As a result, we decided to systematically review phone messages and the time taken to answer calls. This was with the aim of improving the patient experience when telephoning GP practices.

Our review was designed to evaluate the general and out-of-hours messages for all 38 GP practices in the borough. We listened to the messages and assess their content, tone and length as well as identify examples of best practice.

The review revealed a wide variation in the information provided in the recorded messages, and the way the messages were delivered, as well as the length of the messages. There was also a variation in how long it took to answer calls.

31/38 practices acknowledged receipt of the individual practice reports we produced and welcomed our findings and recommendations.

An example of their feedback includes:

“Thanks for the very useful feedback. I can confirm we are in the process of procuring a new cloud base phone system which is able to support the very good practices highlighted by your report. We hope to be up and running by the end of the third quarter. In the meantime, we have reviewed the procedure in reception in order to offer better support to those less favoured by our existing system.” (London Fields Medical Centre)