Our New Appointment Enquiry System

Greggs Wood and Speldhurst Medical Group will be running a new appointment system from 6th March 2024.

On Wednesday 6th March 2024, we introduced ‘Anima’, this new system will replace our current appointment system. In preparation for this change we have contacted all patients 

Anima seamlessly and confidentially integrates with your medical record bringing  improvements to how you access care and appointments and how our staff assess your condition. Anima allows our Clinical Triage Team to continue to improve access times by helping us to direct you to the most appropriate care for your medical needs. This ensures we make use of our limited resources in the most safe and efficient way. All appointments will continue to be offered according to clinical urgency and need.

SIGN UP TO ANIMA

If you are having trouble signing up to Anima and would like some help creating an account or navigating the system we will be holding some lunch time training sessions at the surgeries with members of the admin and management teams;

We will be working in partnership with Digital Kent to run a Digital Support Session, aimed at helping you with your Anima Set up. Digital Kent is a project run by Kent County Council, aimed at supporting Kent residents with their digital access, skills and confidence, and is working with the NHS to support patients with their digital health outcomes.

They will be offering this support on;

• Thursday 7th March 2024, 1pm to 2pm The Old Bakery, Penshurst Road, Speldhurst, TN3 0PE
• Thursday 14th March 2024, 1pm to 2pm The Medical Centre, Greggs wood Road, TN2 3JL

Anima can be a fantastic way of easily managing your health records, prescriptions and appointments, and we will be on hand to help you learn how to feel confident in navigating the NHS App on your phone, tablet or laptop.

This is a walk in service but so we are aware of numbers please register your interest by letting the reception team know via our secure online form

For all sessions, please ensure that you bring along a device of your own (your phone, tablet, or laptop), that your device is fully charged, and that you know any passwords necessary. If you have not created an NHS account before, we can easily help you to do so, but it is necessary for you to be able to access your emails.

Please note

Your request will be handled in exactly the same manner whether you complete the Anima request online yourself, or contact us via telephone, where our receptionists will ask the same questions to ensure equity of access for all patients. 

We would encourage all patients who can do so to use Anima, as this will prevent you needing to queue on the telephone and keep lines free for those who do not have internet access. Completing an Anima request yourself also provides you with more discretion should you prefer not to discuss your medical problem with one of our receptionists.

More information is available on the Anima website. You are able to register now in preparation for our go live on 6th March 2024.
We would like to ask for your patience whilst we change to Anima as we are aware that introducing any new system may have some teething troubles, however we are not anticipating any disruption.

We have listened to patient feedback and hope you find Anima easier to use. We are really excited about this change and the benefits it will bring to all our patients and staff.

What are the benefits to me as a patient?

As a patient you will benefit from:

• Being able to log on to see the status and outcomes of your current and past requests. (Coming Soon: NHS Login will link to Anima).
• You will be asked questions based on your issues (asked without medical jargon)
• You can use the system in a number of languages
• Your medical records will be more complete for the future
• The practice responses will be clearer
• You can provide all the information that the practice needs without waiting on the phone

What are the benefits to the practice?

As a practice, we will benefit from:

• We will see your request in a clear structured format
• We will be able to save all the information about your requests in a structured way into your medical records – This will help staff when looking at your records for this episode of care or in the future.
• As patients can see the status of their request, we should get less duplicates that clog up the system.
• Your requests will be cleared to understand at first glance and so the team will be able to allocate correct people, thus making our turn around more efficient.
• Your requests will come into our system with a Red, Amber, Green rating with clear information about what responses have trigger the rating. This will allow the team to focus on any urgent requests.
• We will be able to provide clearer responses due to the way that Anima builds the response as we perform actions. These responses will be safer as well as it will be secured behind a log in.

Anima FAQs

Published: Feb 9, 2024