Mystery Shopping Project Results Summary

The Method for this Project: 

• Healthwatch Brighton and Hove volunteers and staff met on 4 th May 2014 to review the websites and answerphone messages of all GP practices in Brighton and Hove, according to the 2013 CCG list of practices.
• They were specifically looking for information on NHS 111, the pop-up clinics and opening times, as well as clarity of messages.
• Their findings were individually fed back to all practices in Brighton and Hove, with examples of best practice shared

Results 

Answerphone 

• 10% of answerphones were found to be unclear, due to either fuzziness of the message, fast talking on the message or giving too many confusing out of hours options.
• The majority of answerphones gave multiple out of hours options for different times and days, which made the messages longer and more difficult to understand.
• 66% of answerphone messages offered the surgery opening hours, the remainder commonly stated that the surgery was closed.
• 90% included some information about NHS 111, often amongst other out of hours numbers. Many included information about the 111 service, including that it was free on mobiles and landlines.
• Just 13% of surgeries called included any information about the pop-up clinics available around the city during the winter and spring.

Website 

• 9 of the 53 (17%) surgeries we investigated appeared to have no surgery website available for their patients to view.
• Of these 9 surgeries, 7 claimed to provide online appointment booking and/or online repeat prescriptions on their NHS Choices pages.
• Of the remaining 44 surgeries in Brighton and Hove which had websites, all had information about their surgery opening times available to view.
• 70%  included information about NHS 111, although the quality of information varied from mentioning the service to detailed information about service.
• A range of surgery websites chose to give their own out of hours options, including 0845 numbers and links to other surgeries, alongside their 111 information.