“At least 60% of my time was spent on the phones.”
For thousands of GP receptionists across the UK, that line could be any working day. Reception teams are the front door of NHS primary care, the first voice patients hear and the backbone of GP appointment booking, repeat prescriptions, referrals, and patient triage. Yet the relentless call handling, especially during the notorious 8am rush, is pushing many to the brink. Mentally, emotionally, and professionally.
One current GP receptionist we spoke to (who asked to remain anonymous) described the toll:
“We answer so many calls you drift into automated responses. You’re not exercising your brain and you don’t feel job satisfaction.”
Meanwhile, call volumes spike first thing in the morning, leaving little space for everything else that keeps a GP practice running—care navigation, inbox management, prescriptions, results, and face-to-face support at the front desk. It’s an impossible trade-off that hurts patient experience and staff morale.
Across the NHS, there’s widespread recognition that better access to general practice depends on smarter telephony, faster triage, and clearer routes to care. NHS England’s Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care aims to “tackle the 8am rush” with modern general practice access, including funding and support for digital telephony and improved care navigation.
At the same time, NHS guidance shows practices how to use telephony data—abandoned calls, wait times, call-backs, and call volumes—to match capacity to demand and reduce patient frustration. And to understand the pressure more clearly at system level, NHS England is now collecting cloud-based telephony data from suppliers to inform improvement and winter planning.
Zooming out, the scale of activity is vast: primary care delivers hundreds of millions of appointments each year (353 million in 2023/24 alone), so every efficiency gain matters.
Sadly, support systems are inconsistent. While hospitals often have more formal escalation structures, many GP practices operate like small businesses—leaving frontline staff vulnerable to poor managerial follow-through. One receptionist recounted how a racially abusive patient was only dealt with after she raised it herself, despite the seriousness of the incident.
It’s not about giving receptionists less work, but about giving them back respect, support, and the ability to do their job well.
When asked if reduced phone calls would improve job performance and morale, the answer was emphatic. "It would absolutely improve my work output. It would enable me to have better task management and be less robotic with patients."
AI technology is already changing the game in primary care—and EMMA, the AI receptionist, is leading the way. By fielding up to 90% of inbound calls, EMMA gives real receptionists the breathing room to focus on patient care, not phone chaos.
With EMMA managing routine enquiries, booking requests, and appointment triage, human staff are freed up to:
EMMA isn’t replacing people. She’s relieving them - of constant interruptions, of unnecessary stress, and of the dehumanising grind of back-to-back phone calls. The result? A better experience for patients, and a working day that feels human again.
Demonstrations of EMMA are available now. Contact us today and improve patient satisfaction instantly.