Medical centres to abandon BT switch after phones are cut off for four days
‘It was a really frustrating and difficult situation for everyone last week’
Vulnerable patients were left unable to contact medical centres for four days on Arran last week after BT engineers cut off phone services to every surgery on the island.
The six surgeries of the Arran Medical Group were left without voice and internet communications on Tuesday, September 8, when BT accidentally disconnected the line required to service the number.
And phone lines were not reconnected until last Friday afternoon.
The problems seem to be connected to a planned switch of service provider which has now been abandoned in the meantime. Practice manager, outh Betley, said: ‘I am still waiting to hear from BT on how they are going to learn from this event so that it doesn’t happen again to another remote and rural GP practice. I cannot believe that they didn’t contact us first to say that they were going to cut us off.
‘We were hoping to switch provider to make savings and also to have a simpler process for dealing with any faults/ issues. The identified savings would have been redirected to more frontline parts of the practice such as new equipment. However I am no longer pursuing the switch.’
The glitch blocked out calls into main surgeries at Brodick, Lamlash, Whiting Bay, Shiskine, Corrie and Lochranza.
The doctors of the Arran Medical Group arrived on Tuesday and found that their entire patient phone service was down. Patients who tried calling to make appointments or order repeat prescriptions using the usual number were unable to get through for the rest of the week.
GP Dr David Hogg said: ‘It was a really frustrating and difficult situation for everyone last week.’
Reception staff managed to resurrect an old phone number which connected to Brodick and put this information on social media and their website.
Concerning
Dr Hogg said: ‘Our main concern was that more vulnerable patients who do not use these mediums had no access to the practice. There was no offer to try to put a message on the line. It was just a continuous tone. It was quite concerning if more elderly patients were trying to get through.’
He said there had been situations where the doctors had wanted to speak to hospital staff on the mainland to urgently refer patients or contact doctors in one of their other surgeries to discuss patient issues during the situation.
He said NHS Ayrshire and Arran had been supportive and the island hospital had noticed an increase in people ringing them about medical problems.
A BT spokesman said: ‘The medical practice was in the process of moving to a new service provider, which is not BT. Typically, the new provider is responsible for arranging for their old service to be stopped and their new one to be started via Openreach. While we are still investigating the full circumstances in this case, we arranged for the line to be reactivated on Friday to restore full services.’