Boosting the health of a patient call centre

PwC answers the call

Ramsay Health Care (Ramsay) is one of the UK’s leading independent healthcare providers. As the country emerged from the Coronavirus lockdown and with NHS waitlists buckling under the strain, Ramsay’s National Enquiry Centre (NEC) was inundated with calls. It lacked the manpower to deal with the rapidly growing call volume and couldn’t recruit fast enough to meet demand.

The team needed help – additional bandwidth to handle more calls and improve the experience for patients and staff. This would also give management the headspace to plan for the future. They turned to us, impressed by PwC’s scalable resource, call centre expertise and healthcare credentials.

Two teams, united by a desire to help patients

When patients call the NEC, they’re often at their most vulnerable. Team members must be empathetic and sensitive to the situation faced by their caller. 

Our experience helping other healthcare providers provided peace-of-mind. But it was meeting our people on the ground in Belfast and witnessing our approach to managed services that persuaded Ramsay that we were the ideal partner for them. Not only would they be able to tap into our skills and insights, but they also saw in our team a similar desire to make a difference.

Collaboration and data tracking for constant improvement

Good things happen when people come together. So we began with a ‘Winning Teams’ workshop. An opportunity for PwC and Ramsay teams to align on strategic direction, it’s also an intense training programme to understand how to deal with specific queries and log contacts. This was complemented by regular visits to Belfast to encourage knowledge transfer. 

From there, we looked for opportunities to optimise operations, all the while delivering an improved service for patients day-in, day-out. We created efficient new ways to log caller notes to improve consistency and free up time to spend on more challenging enquiries. And we identified a number of other data points which could be orchestrated and analysed to yield insights for strategic decision-making.

Allowing Ramsay to focus on the bigger picture

All told, we helped answer the phone to 29,000 patients and booked 5,500 outpatient appointments. We increased the answer rate to patients trying to contact the NEC by an average of 25 percent. And the average call handling time was improved by 40 percent. 

We captured 300,000 new client held data points, which helped identify a number of process improvements. Here’s just one example. Our team noticed there were calls coming every day for services that couldn’t be provided by the NEC. Our manual tracking made the case for changes in the call routing system. The result is a better service for patients, and extra capacity in the NEC to help more patients. 

Knowing the contact centre was in safe hands gave managers the breathing space to focus on more strategic matters. Sharing new data points and intel from patient calls helped them understand and better cope with demand. PwC’s involvement also improved morale at the NEC, where call centre operatives were once again able to deliver a great experience for patients.