Keith wrote on Oct 23^rd, 2008 at 10:56am:

There was reference to this matter in the debate on Access to Primary Care in parliament last Thursday (see reply #149).

I hope that the extended period has been caused by genuine attempts to work out the detail of a solution to help those who are trapped in lengthy contracts. If the DH is to offer financial support for surgeries, and other NHS providers, who wish to take advantage of advanced telephone systems (to replace that presently being provided by patients) then this could take some time. Such a system would perhaps also have to made available to those who are not yet using Surgery Line or similar systems.

Members can be assured that there is a continuing flow of correspondence between the DH and many who are concerned about this matter. It is unfortunate that Ministers and senior officials cannot engage in meaningful correspondence with citizens on matters such as this. They are however answerable to parliament, and many MPs are sufficiently engaged to press this matter on behalf of their constituents.

I will always post about significant developments in this forum. As this forum is open to the public, I do not give a blow-by-blow account of all campaigning activity.

I only deal privately with particular issues raised by members when the necessary detail would be inappropriate in the forum. I also discuss campaigning tactics in confidence, where it may not be appropriate to share this discussion with those whose interests may be damaged if they were successful.

Readers need not fear that anything of significance is not either posted here or covered in detail on my campaign resource website.

Keith wrote on Oct 23^rd, 2008 at 10:56am:

I cannot number the briefing messages that I have sent to MPs, Ministers, the media and others. Many of them produce no recognisable meaningful response; however there is an attritional effect. After receiving many messages which prompted no acknowledgement, journalists and MPs have contacted me when a particular issue hits the spot and thanked me for the previous briefings that I have been providing.


There are two good reasons for not publishing everything here, apart from concerns about confidentiality.

Firstly, some campaigning efforts may not be seen to be effective. This discourages other campaigners and invites criticism which may not be helpful. I prefer to wait to report any positive effect, rather than reporting the action that may have caused it.

Secondly, we are seeking to prompt action and changes of policy by Ministers and public officials. Nobody likes to admit that they have changed their mind - "made a U-turn". This is especially true if the change could be seen to have been prompted by an informal and not properly representative pressure group or just a handful of individuals. We must present our sound and strong arguments, both publicly and privately, however we may have to forego the satisfaction of talking full credit for what we may achieve, as seeking to do so by presenting evidence of our efforts may actually deny achievement of success.

Apologies if this sounds a little convoluted, perhaps I could have expressed it more clearly.

The debate on this issue seems to have gone quiet of late....

I have been undertaking a bit of detective work with my local surgery. Trying to get any alternative numbers to the 0844 rip off one from  surgery staff has met with the usual lies. Having had to visit the surgery a few times recently my roving eye noticed one or two telephone numbers on the wall in a couple of doctor's rooms.
My surgery has around 6 doctors and many other associated services on site. The information available which I have seen on the walls and trial and error has lead me to the following information:

the telephone system is an 'IP Office set up'. This would appear to be an IP system with voicemail

there are approximately 40 'extensions' on the system which each extension having a two digit number

only the doctors have DDI numbers with a standard 'local' area code. Therefore there are 6 of these which run consecutively

from random dialing many  numbers around this block there would appear to be a group of around 300 numbers possibly allocated to this type of use (I'm assuming that because the lines ring dead that they are reserved for this type of use). Outside this block the numbers are heavily in use on the local exchange

the adjacent numbers outside the block are primarily are run by BT

there would appear at the moment to be no DDI numbers for the most important area i.e. appointments and general enquiries. The lists I have seen on the walls show the DDI for the doctors but no alternative for appointments etc. The internal extension number for the GP bears no relation to the number used for the DDI

however there are a further two DDI numbers which do not have voicemail and continually ring out any time of the day or night. I have tried to call these two during office hours and never get a reply

I have also random dialed several of the other block numbers to see if they may belong to another surgery in the area also using Surgeryline, but no luck

the fax number has remained on the old system which was set up by the PCT and had many thousands of extensions. All the former direct numbers have been withdrawn save the fax number. I've tried random dialling these but only get other doctors surgeries

From this information I'm hoping that someone will have enough knowledge to try and crack the puzzle in obtaining other numbers.

Any ideas?......

I think that all leedslad actually wanted is the help of someone like Dave to explain which other number ranges he might try and search for a geographic alternative in.  I don't think he is that interested in the Machiavellian obfuscation of Ben Bradshaw and other New Labour ministers who repeatedly express crocodile tiers of public concern about this matter while doing absolutely nothing to ban the root cause of the problem (namely their total failure to impose satisfactory rules on this matter controlling all NHS GP Contractors use of phone numbers and having retroactive effect).

However as this is a voip system it is highly likely that the calls for the appointments line are routed directly to the appointments phones by voip from the 0844 number and that there is no final geographic number to which the calls are translated.  NEG clearly anticipated the widespread public dislike of their shystery deals with GPs and so deliberately set out to create a system on which this site could not offer any geographic alternatives.

My surgery has a recorded message telling you to dial the 08 number.

The case I was thinking of was the Clarendon Park Medical Centre in Leicester, which was mentioned before. If you Google that, you'll still find almost exclusively the 0116 number. I've just tried that number and it gives the BT-style error beeps followed by the message "This number does not accept incoming calls" then cuts off! No message giving an alternate number. So as I said, it's not good if you needed to call the doctor in a hurry.

No-one's suggesting they should stay on 0844 forever, rather that they should continue to accept calls on the old 01 numbers. Also, even if they switched back to a geographical number, they could keep the non-geographical number working while it's slowly phased out.

Perhaps you should try not to tell people what they should discuss so often. Not everyone's interested in joining some sort of campaign group. Some of us prefer simply to discuss numbers and help others when they ask queries, rather than jump on them for not wading through the masses of information and poor site navigation...

For my part, I didn't make any reference to the specific case I knew of, which came up a while ago (possibly not even in this thread?) Of course, I should have realised many surgeries will have recorded messages with the new number. So my suggestion to leedslad and others only applies if their surgery's number is like the one in Leicester.

As for accessing the NHS (and I know I'm going off topic here), why can't they enable the 03 alternative for NHS Direct? 0345 4647 is an even catchier number, and as 0345 numbers are reserved for the 0845 equivalent, it isn't as if any numbers in the 0345 46 range could ever be allocated for anything else. Once again, the 0845 number would of course need to be kept operational for the reason we've been discussing!