Clinics and practices, updated July 2026
Only 49.8% of patients found it easy to get through to their GP by phone in 2023, down from 67.6% in 2021. That is NHS England, citing the GP Patient Survey. An AI receptionist from DILR Voice answers every call on the first ring, books, reschedules and routes, at $0.14 a minute. It does not triage, diagnose or give clinical advice, and it escalates anything urgent to your team immediately.
An AI receptionist books and routes. It does not triage. DILR Voice will take the call, book the appointment, answer an administrative question from your own documents, capture the details and hand over to your team. It will not assess symptoms, decide how urgent a call is, diagnose anything or offer medical advice, and we will not configure it to. Deciding urgency is a clinical act and it belongs to clinicians.
Anything that sounds urgent escalates immediately, with warm transfer and full context, rather than the agent trying to work out how serious it is. If what you need is a system that makes clinical urgency judgments, an AI receptionist is the wrong product and you should not buy one from us or from anyone else.
And to be direct about compliance: DILR Voice does not claim HIPAA. If you need HIPAA on the voice platform, Retell AI and Vapi offer it and we do not. Our HIPAA-aligned work is Dilr Mira, private clinical models that run on your own hardware so patient data never leaves your environment.
The research
NHS England publishes this data itself, citing the GP Patient Survey. Read the two bars together with the number underneath them, because that third figure is the one that reframes the whole conversation.
Percent of patients responding positively. GP Patient Survey, published by NHS England.
| GP Patient Survey measure | 2021 | 2023 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy to get through by phone | 67.6% | 49.8% | 17.8 points worse |
| Good overall experience booking | 70.6% | 54.4% | 16.2 points worse |
| Found receptionists helpful | Not shown | 82.2% | The staff are not the problem |
Source: NHS England, citing the GP Patient Survey 2023, citing the GP Patient Survey 2023. A separate Department of Health and Social Care pulse-check in December 2022 found one in five people did not get through or get a reply at all. The 82.2% figure is why we wrote this page the way we did. Patients rate the receptionists highly and rate the phone line badly, which means the problem is capacity at 8am, not the people answering. An AI receptionist adds lines, it does not replace the person patients already said they liked.
The work
Every item here is a call with a correct answer that does not require a clinician. That boundary is the product design, not a limitation we are apologising for.
Where the 49.8% comes from
Answers every line at once instead of queueing patients behind each other. Concurrency is the entire point: a voice agent does not have a limit of however many receptionists are at a desk at 8:01am.
The phone-access number fell nearly 18 points in two years. That is a capacity failure at a predictable time of day, which is the most fixable kind.
The highest-volume administrative call
Takes the booking, moves it, cancels it, and captures the details, at any hour. Making it easy to cancel is how a slot gets reused instead of a patient quietly not arriving.
Booking experience fell from 70.6% to 54.4% between 2021 and 2023, tracking the phone number almost exactly. These are the same problem.
Grounded in your own documents
Opening hours, appointment preparation instructions, where to park, what to bring, how repeat prescriptions work at your practice, all answered from your own documents through a RAG knowledge base rather than from a model's general knowledge.
Grounding is what stops an agent improvising. If the answer is not in your documents, the agent should not have one, and it should hand over.
The hard boundary
Escalates. No symptom assessment, no urgency scoring, no advice, no diagnosis. Warm transfer to your team with context, immediately.
A voice agent guessing at clinical urgency is a patient-safety risk, not an efficiency gain. We would rather lose the sale than ship that.
Book 30 minutes and we will run a live inbound demo on your actual practice call flow, and show you exactly where it hands over to your team.
What people actually ask
We do not reproduce Reddit quotes, because we cannot link you to a thread we have verified. Read the live discussion and judge it yourself:
Go deeper
Book 30 minutes and we will run a live inbound demo against your real practice calls, with the clinical boundary set up in front of you. Or start free with $10 of credits, no credit card.
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