Multi-site practice · 17,000+ patients
Staffa Health
Scaling safe patient access across a multi-site practice
Reporting period 1–31 May 2026 · Member of South Hardwick PCN, Joined Up Care Derbyshire
- 17,000+ Registered patients
- 3 sites Tibshelf · Stonebroom · Holmewood
- Outstanding CQC overall rating
- AccuRx Integrated across all relevant pathways
Key results at a glance
Executive summary
Staffa Health is an NHS GP practice rated Outstanding by the Care Quality Commission, serving more than 17,000 patients across sites in Tibshelf, Stonebroom and Holmewood, with a higher-than-average proportion of older patients. Like most practices, it faces concentrated peaks of telephone demand — most acutely first thing on weekday mornings — that place its reception team under sustained pressure.
Staffa Health deployed Jackie to act as the first point of contact on selected inbound patient calls. Jackie answers immediately, captures appointment, sick-note and routine-care requests through structured questioning, detects potentially urgent symptoms, and routes everything to the practice team — with requests for the relevant pathways flowing directly into the practice’s AccuRx workflow.
Over the calendar month of May 2026 Jackie handled 1,964 inbound calls, resolved 853 of them end-to-end with no reception involvement, and reclaimed 50.9 hours of reception call-handling time — absorbing up to 18 simultaneous calls at peak. Patient feedback collected over the same window was predominantly positive, with two thirds of respondents rating their experience 4 or 5 out of 5.
The challenge
When the telephone — the front door of the practice — becomes congested, the whole system feels it. Staffa Health faced the operational pressures familiar to high-performing practices operating at scale.
Concentrated peaks of demand
A human receptionist can take only one call at a time. Demand at Staffa Health is heavily front-loaded: call data for the period shows the single busiest hour is Tuesday 08:00–09:00, with mornings across the week consistently the pressure point. During these windows, patients queue, redial, or give up — raising anxiety for patients and stress for staff.
A large, multi-site, older population
Serving 17,000+ patients across three sites, with a higher-than-average older demographic, places significant and continuous volume on reception. Routine, repeatable work — booking requests, medication reviews, blood-test monitoring and sick notes — consumes time that skilled staff could spend on more complex patient needs.
Access as a safety issue
Long phone queues are not only a source of dissatisfaction; they can delay the surfacing of urgent need. Any solution therefore had to improve access without compromising clinical safety.
The solution
Jackie is a digital receptionist designed to work alongside the existing reception team, not replace it. At Staffa Health, Jackie serves as the first point of contact on selected inbound calls, handling high-volume routine workflows end-to-end while preserving full human oversight and a route to a person at any time.
- Immediate answer, no queue Every call is picked up at once, eliminating hold time.
- Concurrent capacity Jackie handled up to 18 simultaneous calls during the period — capacity a single receptionist cannot match.
- Structured capture Patients are guided through clinically relevant questions, producing a consistent, accurate summary for the practice team.
- Safety indicator detection Potentially urgent symptoms are identified; Jackie warns the patient that their condition sounds urgent and escalates to reception.
- AccuRx form integration The AccuRx form integration is enabled across all the relevant pathways, so structured requests pass directly into the practice’s existing AccuRx workflow rather than creating manual re-keying for reception.
Quantifiable outcomes
Across 1,964 inbound calls in May 2026, Jackie carried the routine load while routing everything that needed a person cleanly, with a structured summary attached.
| Outcome | Calls | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Resolved end-to-end by Jackie | 853 | 43% |
| Routed to the practice team | 867 | 44% |
| Abandoned by caller | 241 | 12.3% |
Jackie’s fully-handled rate for the period — the share of calls she carried to a complete outcome once two groups are set aside: requests outside Jackie’s configured scope at this practice (for example prescription requests, which are not routed to Jackie here) and calls the caller abandoned before Jackie could engage. It measures how well Jackie completes the work she is actually configured to do, and is a different metric from the 43% resolved end-to-end above.
Of the calls resolved by Jackie, 61% were appointment requests, 23% other enquiries, 10% routine care and 6% safety-indicator escalations, with the remainder sick-note requests.
Where a person was needed, this was most often because the request fell outside Jackie’s configured scope (50%) or because the patient asked for a person (44%).
Speed and capacity
- Reception call-handling time reclaimed
- 50.9 hours
- Average resolution time (Jackie-handled)
- 3.6 minutes
- Average handling time (human-supported)
- 6.2 minutes
- Peak simultaneous calls
- 18
Clinical signal
What the month showed clinically
Staffa Health runs three sites for a list with a higher-than-average proportion of older patients. The clinically interesting part is that the busiest forty minutes of the week stopped being the moment the practice was least able to listen.
- Eighteen conversations at once, at the hour it matters A receptionist holds one conversation at a time, and demand arrives in a spike. Jackie held up to 18 simultaneous calls, so the patients calling at the peak were heard in the same way as the patients calling at eleven — not met with a queue and a redial.
- Medication review as the leading routine request Medication review made up 53% of routine-care requests and blood-test monitoring a further 31%. These are the recall-and-monitoring workflows where a missed contact turns into an overdue one, captured in a consistent structure every time.
- Structured capture, no re-keying With the AccuRx form integration enabled across all relevant pathways, requests reached clinicians in the practice’s existing workflow rather than being re-typed from a note. What a clinician reviewed was what the patient actually said.
Demand insights for resource planning
Beyond handling calls, Jackie turns call data into a planning asset, giving practice leadership a granular view of why patients are getting in touch.
Routine care requests 81 requests
High-volume, repeatable workflows well suited to structured capture. Sick-note requests were comparatively low in volume (11 in the month), with most either extensions or cases Jackie identified as not eligible and resolved with appropriate guidance, avoiding unnecessary admin tasks.
Patient and staff experience
Patient perception is decisive for the success of any change to how people access their practice. Staffa Health gathered 219 pieces of patient feedback on Jackie during the period. The picture is clearly positive overall, with candid, useful signal in the minority of critical responses.
What patients valued
“Excellent experience. Clearly understood all answers, even when they weren’t clear or straightforward. Confirmed answers before submission.”
“I sighed when the AI tool came on but was surprisingly quick, responsive and accurate.”
“Very helpful. Saves time. Great service.”
“The best AI robot I have ever dealt with — thank you for organising call backs from the doctors so quickly.”
Addressing friction points
The themes below are drawn from the free-text comments left by patients who rated their experience neutral or negative, and translate directly into a configuration and model-improvement roadmap.
| Theme | Frequency | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Preference for a human receptionist | Most common | Clearer up-front opt-out, with a set phrase to reach a person at any point |
| Repetition / speech understanding (incl. accents) | Frequent | Speech-model tuning for local accents and medical terms; removing repeat loops |
| Pace / being cut off mid-answer | Occasional | Turn-timing adjustments and brief guidance on how to speak to Jackie |
| Hand-off to a person not always honoured | Occasional | Strengthened reliability of the human-handoff trigger |
This feedback loop — capturing patient sentiment at scale and translating it directly into configuration and model improvements — is central to how Jackie matures within each practice.
Workflow integration
Jackie fits into Staffa Health’s existing systems rather than asking the practice to change how it works. Calls Jackie cannot or should not complete are routed to the team with a structured summary already attached, and, with the AccuRx form integration enabled across all the relevant pathways, requests flow directly into the practice’s AccuRx workflow. The result is less manual re-keying, a consistent record for every captured request, and clinicians reviewing and actioning patient needs with the context they need to hand.
Conclusion
- Immediate access and capacity: zero queue, up to 18 concurrent calls, and 50.9 hours of reception time reclaimed in a single month.
- End-to-end resolution: 853 calls completed by Jackie with no reception involvement, at an average of 3.6 minutes.
- Positive patient reception: two thirds of respondents rating their experience 4 or 5 out of 5, with critical feedback driving continuous improvement.
- Seamless integration: structured requests flowing directly into the practice’s AccuRx workflow across all relevant pathways.
- Clinical capture: safety-indicator escalations passed to the practice team, and medication review and monitoring requests recorded in a consistent structure every time.
About Staffa Health
Staffa Health is an NHS GP practice in Derbyshire, serving more than 17,000 patients from its main surgery in Tibshelf and branch sites in Stonebroom and Holmewood. The practice is rated Outstanding overall by the Care Quality Commission and is a member of the South Hardwick Primary Care Network within Joined Up Care Derbyshire.
Data range: 1–31 May 2026. Figures are drawn from Jackie’s digital reception analytics and patient feedback collected at Staffa Health over the period.
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