Telecoms and IT for Healthcare and Care Providers
Phones, queueing and call reporting for GP practices, dental, veterinary, private clinics and care homes — where an unanswered call is a clinical problem before it is an administrative one.
Talk to us about healthcareHealthcare is not one market, and the phone does not do the same job in each part of it. A GP practice runs against an appointment book and a contract. A dental or veterinary practice lives or dies on what happens to the call that arrives at ten to five on a Friday. A private clinic is coordinating consultants, secretaries and more than one site. A care home has no appointment book at all — it has residents, families ringing at any hour, and one or two staff awake overnight covering a whole building. What they share is that the phone is the route into care rather than into a transaction, so the cost of not answering is carried by the person who rang rather than by the month's figures.
In general practice there is contractual pressure behind this as well as clinical pressure. NHS England has moved practices off analogue lines and onto cloud-based telephony, and the part that gets underestimated is not the phone system — it is the data. What is expected is a platform whose call data can be extracted and shared, rather than kept locally as a report somebody prints when asked. Which measures apply, on what timetable, and through which purchasing route, are questions for NHS England and your ICB rather than for us: that guidance has been revised more than once, and their version is the one that counts. Two things we will be straight about. Practices buying through the national route can only choose from an approved supplier list, so if that is your route, ask us early whether we can supply you under it rather than late. And dental, veterinary, private clinics and care homes sit outside all of it.
The 8am rush is a queueing problem, and it is worth being exact about that, because it is almost always treated as a staffing one. Demand does not arrive spread across the morning, it arrives in the first few minutes, and adding a receptionist raises the rate you can serve at while doing nothing about the shape of the arrival. The older failure is worse than slow. On a fixed number of analogue lines, capacity runs out at the line count: once every line is in use, the next caller hears an engaged tone and never enters a queue at all, so they redial, and the redialling is itself load. The appointment then goes to whoever has the fastest redial finger, who is not the same person as whoever rang first, or whoever is most unwell. A queue changes that before it changes anything else — everybody gets in, everybody keeps their place, and the order becomes the order they arrived in.
Around that sits the rest of it. Recording a call in a healthcare setting captures clinical detail, so retention, playback access and what the announcement says are decisions to make before switching it on rather than after a complaint: we configure them, and your Caldicott Guardian, DPO or information governance lead owns the policy. Care homes need almost none of the queueing work and all of the rest, and they are the one part of this sector where the building matters more than the platform. Underneath all of it is the analogue network — stop sell is already in force and the UK PSTN and ISDN network closes in January 2027, which matters most for care alarms, lift phones and door entry rather than for the handsets anyone has already counted. SCG Solutions is part of SCG, the Southern Communications Group — a UK provider since 1965, 450-plus staff and a Tier 2 ISP. Every client gets a named local director rather than a call queue, with 24/7 UK-based support behind them.
How we help healthcare
A queue instead of an engaged tone
Callers get into the system and hold their place in the order they rang, rather than hitting the line limit and redialling into the same wall.
Callback that holds the place
Where the platform and licence support it, the caller hangs up, keeps their position and is rung back. That is what breaks the redial spiral, so it is worth confirming before choosing a system rather than after.
Call data at the level of the call
Offered, answered and abandoned, by hour and by number, with waits as a distribution rather than an average — the form the data has to be in before it can be extracted or acted on.
Recording with the access list decided first
Retention period, named playback with a log, what the announcement says, and which lines are recorded at all. All configuration, and all far easier before it is switched on than after.
Branch sites on one system
Several surgeries, clinics or homes run as one platform with dialling by extension, so a call can be answered wherever there is somebody free rather than only where it landed.
Care homes: nights, buildings and old lines
DECT coverage that reaches the staff who are awake and moving, out-of-hours routing to the on-call manager, and a survey of the care alarm and lift lines still sitting on analogue.
The morning peak, treated as a queue
These decisions are made once and then run every day. Almost all of them are configuration rather than product, and none of them work until the platform underneath can hold enough concurrent calls to let people in — which is exactly what a fixed analogue line count silently prevents.
- Enough concurrent call capacity that callers enter the queue instead of hearing engaged, which is the constraint that decides everything else
- Position announcement, so a caller knows whether they are second or twenty-second and can decide accordingly
- Queue callback where the platform and licence support it, so the place is held without the line being held
- An urgent route that does not sit behind the queue, agreed clinically, so the queue never becomes the only way through
- Overflow after a set wait — to a second group, a branch site or a message you have agreed — rather than a ring that never ends
- Separate numbers for appointments, prescriptions and results, so a five-second query is not queued behind a ten-minute one
- Staff able to log in and out of groups, so an absent phone is not adding delay for everyone behind it
- A short auto attendant only where the options are genuinely different, because a menu is a cost paid by every caller
What you have to be able to report
Reporting is where the contractual pressure lands, and it is also the only way to tell a staffing problem from a routing problem, because from reception the two look identical. The unit to insist on is the individual call: everything else can be derived from it, and nothing can be derived from a summary.
- Calls offered, answered and abandoned — abandoned being the group that is invisible without reporting, because a caller who gives up leaves no trace
- The 08:00 to 08:30 window separable from the rest of the day, since averaging it away hides the entire problem
- Time to answer as a distribution: how many waited over five minutes, over ten, rather than the mean
- Where in the wait callers gave up, which distinguishes a queue that is too long from a message that is wrong
- Concurrent calls at peak, so you can see whether the system itself ran out of room
- Volume per number, so appointments, prescriptions, results and branch sites can be told apart
- Callbacks requested against callbacks completed, where callback is in use
- Call-level data that can be exported, rather than a dashboard somebody screenshots
Recording, confidentiality and patient data
A recording in a healthcare setting is a clinical record in audio form: symptoms, medication, safeguarding, and sometimes information about a person who is not the caller. That does not make recording wrong, but it does mean the default settings are the wrong settings, and every one of them is a decision somebody should make on purpose.
- A retention period chosen from what you actually use recordings for, rather than left indefinite
- Playback restricted to named people and logged, with the ability to listen separated from the ability to delete
- Selective recording by line or team, so you hold what you need instead of everything
- An announcement that says why, applied to outbound calls as well as inbound
- Recordings held in the UK, with a plain answer on encryption at rest and on who at the provider can reach them — ask us before you rely on it
- Cyber security around the practice network: MFA, email scanning, patching and 24/7 monitoring
- Tested backups and a documented recovery plan, rather than a backup nobody has ever restored from
- Plain answers to the supplier questions your own information governance return asks — where the data sits, who can reach it, how long it is kept
Care homes, clinics, and the lines nobody counted
A care home is not a small GP practice. The volume is low, each call matters on its own, and the hard part is the building and the hours rather than the peak. Alongside it sits the set of analogue lines that exists in almost every healthcare building and appears on nobody's list.
- DECT coverage designed for the building — converted houses, thick walls and later extensions behave nothing like an office floor
- Out-of-hours routing to the staff who are awake and moving, escalating to an on-call manager, rather than to a desk phone in an empty office
- Handsets chosen for whether a resident can hear and work them, which is a different specification from the one a desk gets
- Resident and visitor Wi-Fi on its own network, away from care records and administration
- Emergency and out-of-hours routing for dental and veterinary practices, including handover to a partner service
- Care alarms, lift emergency phones, door entry and fire panel diallers surveyed before the PSTN closes in January 2027
- Third-party involvement started early, because the alarm, lift and fire companies control most of those changes, not us
- A second route to the internet so the phones survive a circuit fault, with cloud telephony answerable on mobiles if the building itself is unusable
Healthcare — Common Questions
Is cloud telephony actually a contractual requirement for GP practices?
For general practice, in substance yes. NHS England has moved practices off analogue lines and onto cloud-based telephony, and the expectation does not stop at the phone system — it extends to the call data the platform holds and can hand over. What we will not do is quote you a deadline or a metric list, because those are set by NHS England and your ICB, they have been revised more than once, and their version is the one that counts. Ask them what applies to you now, and ask us what a system has to be capable of in order to satisfy it. Dental, veterinary, private clinics and care homes are not covered by any of it.
Will a call queue fix the 8am rush?
It will fix the fairness and the visibility. It will not create appointments. If forty appointments are available and three hundred people ring, two hundred and sixty are disappointed whichever system you run. What changes is that they find out in two minutes rather than after twenty-five minutes of redialling, and that the people who got through are the ones who rang first rather than the ones with the fastest redial. It also produces the number that tells you what your demand actually is, which is the only honest basis for arguing about capacity, staffing or opening the phones earlier.
Should callers be told their position in the queue?
Usually yes, with one condition attached. Telling somebody they are twenty-second makes some of them hang up, and that is the right outcome for a caller who would otherwise have waited half an hour for an appointment list that had already emptied. It is the wrong outcome for the caller who should not have hung up. So the rule is that the urgent route must not sit behind the queue: a break-out option agreed clinically, and clear wording about when to use 111 or 999. With that in place, a position announcement is an honesty improvement rather than a risk.
What should we be able to report on?
Calls offered, answered and abandoned, split by hour so the first half hour is visible on its own. Time to answer as a distribution rather than an average, because the mean hides the people who waited fifteen minutes. The point in the wait at which people gave up. Concurrent calls at peak, which tells you whether the system itself ran out of room. And volume per number, so appointments, prescriptions and results can be told apart. Insist on data at the level of the individual call: a summary can always be produced from call records, but call records can never be reconstructed from a summary.
Can we record calls without creating an information governance problem?
Yes, if the decisions are made deliberately rather than left at their defaults. A recording here captures clinical detail and sometimes information about a third party, so the settings that matter are the retention period, who can play a recording back, whether playback is logged, which lines are recorded at all, and what the announcement says. All of those are configuration, and all are far easier to set now than to unwind later once habits have formed. We will configure them to your policy. We will not write the policy — that belongs with your Caldicott Guardian, DPO or whoever holds information governance, and it should stay there.
We are a veterinary practice. How do out-of-hours calls get handled?
Out of hours is the defining problem in veterinary work, and it is a routing question rather than a hardware one. Calls outside opening hours can go to the on-call vet's mobile as part of the same system, rather than as a separate number clients have to be given, or hand over to a partner out-of-hours provider, with a recorded message stating plainly which it is. Dental emergency lines work the same way. The two things worth getting right are that the handover is unambiguous to a worried caller at 2am, and that whatever the message promises actually rings somewhere that is answered.
What is different about a care home?
Almost everything. There is no 8am peak to engineer around — the volume is low and each call matters on its own. The hard parts are the building and the hours. Converted period properties with thick walls and later extensions are poor ground for DECT and Wi-Fi, so coverage is a survey rather than an assumption. Overnight, one or two staff are awake and moving around a whole building, so calls have to reach them and then escalate to an on-call manager rather than ring a desk phone in an empty office. And residents who use a phone themselves need a handset chosen for hearing rather than for features.
Our lift phone and care alarm are still on analogue lines. What happens?
They stop working when the network they sit on closes, and stop sell is already in force ahead of the January 2027 switch off. These are the lines to start with rather than finish with, because the fix is rarely a like-for-like swap and rarely ours to make alone: a care alarm may need a new communicator from the alarm company, a lift phone usually needs a GSM unit and an engineer into the shaft, and a fire panel sits under somebody else's maintenance contract. The first step is a survey of what is actually connected, because the records are almost never right — and most surveys also turn up lines being paid for that do nothing at all.
Services for healthcare
Let's talk about your healthcare setup
Tell us what happens at eight o'clock — how many lines you have, how many callers get an engaged tone, and what you can currently report — and we will tell you what is a queueing problem, what is a capacity problem, and what is neither.