TL;DR
Patients at the Newbury Street Practice, a surgery in Wantage in Oxfordshire, have described the AI triage bot that now answers every call to the surgery as a “wall” between them and care, in a BBC report on 14 October based on Local Democracy Reporting Service material. The practice says feedback was 79% positive in the first month, that the system has passed NHS assurance checks and that over 1,300 practices use it, and that the aim is to free staff for patients who cannot or will not use digital routes. It is the latest in a run of GP receptionist stories we have followed, including a Norfolk surgery that dropped its bot in September.
The surgery introduced the AI Andi system in July. Every call passes through it first, and the bot can hand over to a human receptionist. The practice website describes a tool that “listens carefully, understands how you’re feeling, and helps you get what you need quickly”.
What patients say
Jo Rogers said the bot “puts you off ever bothering” to contact the practice, after she waited 20 minutes in a queue only for the system to decide it could not help. Tricia Lockhart, who is 65, said the bot concluded she was calling about a pregnancy. John Allinson saw the technology as a cost-cutting exercise, which the practice disputes.
Olly Glover, the Liberal Democrat MP for Didcot and Wantage, has taken up residents’ complaints and spoken to the surgery, which he said was, like many others, trying to streamline its administration. His wider point was about capacity: housing growth across the constituency has outrun health infrastructure, and “successive governments have not taken the need to provide health and other infrastructure ahead of new homes seriously enough”.
The practice’s case
The surgery says the purpose was “to improve access, increase capacity and allow staff to spend more time supporting patients who are unable or choose not to use our digital options”. It accepts that the change has been harder for some, especially patients less at ease with technology, says any new system takes time to settle, and is reviewing feedback to decide what further support patients may need.
Looking forward
The pattern is now familiar. We reported in September that a Fakenham practice withdrew its AI receptionist after complaints, and this week that GP practices are receiving AI-written complaints running to 20 pages. In our view the Wantage figures are the interesting part: 79% positive feedback and a vocal minority are both real, and the deciding question for any practice is whether the people the bot fails are the same people least able to route around it. A triage system that cannot reliably hand a 65-year-old to a human is not saving capacity, it is moving the queue.