Benefits for practices: 

• Supports practice resilience and flexibility including remote working, home working, hub working and alternative locations. This is important for business continuity.  
• Supports the practice to manage a large workload and demand including growth in telephone consultations. 
• Real-time analytics to monitor in-coming telephony demand and workforce capacity. 
• Monthly management reports to monitor wait times, identify times of peak demand and workforce performance. 

 Benefits for patients: 

• Improved patient experience and access, for example, reduced call waiting times and automated call-back.   
• Supports continuity of care for patients, for example, automated redirection of the call to hubs, alternative locations, self-referral pathways and out of hours sites.   

 For further information on benefits and outcomes, visit the NHS Digital website.

The cloud-based telephony approach is being led by the NCL GPIT team. The strategy for NCL will focus on three key areas: 

1. Support all practices to switch from analogue telephony to a cloud-based telephony solution 
2. Support practices to enable all four key features as outlined in the ‘Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care’ 
3. Support practices with aligning their telephony supplier across their PCNs in order to facilitate cross-PCN working 

The NCL digital team has developed cloud-based telephony resource pack to support GP surgery staff with utilising the digital telephony systems and enabling the four key features outlined in the ‘Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care’. 

Please see the latest resource pack in the ‘useful resources’ section of this page.

The GPIT team is looking to set up a series of support sessions and virtual workshops with suppliers in the future. These will be made available to practices and advertised on the NCL GP website. 

Further support and guidance for practices on X-on Surgery Connect 
The X-on Surgery Connect website includes a detailed instructions and advice on key areas of the Surgery Connect system. There are also several training resources for GP practices and FAQs. 

There is also detailed information on accessing the support portal and help centre. From the support portal, practices can access online help, see the current system status, view webinars and training resources and raise a support ticket. Please see the important links under useful resources on this page.

If you currently use a cloud-based telephony provider that is not aligned to the rest of the practices within the PCN please contact GPIT about changing your provider.