Healthcare providers

Good care is a basic right — and reliable communication is essential to delivering it. Over the past two decades, we have set up countless emergency numbers, on-call lines, and incident hotlines for healthcare providers in the Netherlands — it is one of our core specialities. Now we are bringing that same expertise to the UK market.

Whether you run a GP surgery, hospital department, pharmacy, dental practice, or veterinary clinic, CallFactory gives you a phone system built around the realities of medical work — not the other way around.

Every GP surgery in the UK knows the Monday morning rush. Lines open at 8am, and within seconds the queue is full. Patients redial over and over, receptionists are overwhelmed, and appointments are gone before most people get through. It is the single biggest source of patient frustration — and staff stress — in primary care.

CallFactory handles this differently. Our call queue holds every caller in line with a waiting message, so they do not hear an engaged tone and do not need to redial.

But the real solution is reducing the number of calls that need a human in the first place. Our voicebot and phone menu can handle the routine requests automatically:

• Press 1 for repeat prescriptions — the patient leaves their details by voicemail, transcribed and emailed to the dispensary
• Press 2 for sick notes and admin — handled via recorded instructions or voicemail
• Press 3 to speak to a receptionist — only the calls that genuinely need a person reach the desk

The result: shorter queues, less stress for staff, and patients who can actually get through when they need to.

Emergency and on-call numbers can be configured quickly — because medical teams must always be reachable, without exception. Our IVR platform handles this reliably. Even when call volumes surge — during a public health incident or a seasonal spike in GP enquiries — capacity is never an issue.

Callers can be placed in a queue or connected to a group of practitioners. You can add phone menus (emergency or routine?) and adjust call routing at any time.

Our standard configuration for a practice or emergency line includes:

• A call queue that only activates when there are more callers than can be connected. If it is quiet, the caller is connected immediately.
• A welcome message: “Welcome to the 24-hour service of Dr Parker’s Surgery”
• A phone menu: “Press 1 for health information, press 2 to speak to a practitioner”

Under option 1, you can play recorded information — from your own team or a professional voice actor. We also offer an advanced text-to-speech engine that sounds natural and professional, allowing you to update announcements quickly — even in the evenings and at weekends.

Under option 2, calls are forwarded to whoever is on duty. Staff set their availability via a simple web page, and our system always knows who is currently reachable.

We have built a dedicated on-call management page specifically for healthcare. Staff log in or out with a single click, and the system routes calls accordingly. It is more flexible and reliable than using shared calendars or messaging groups — and it ensures the phone is always answered.

No app is required. We deliver calls directly to the mobile phone through the mobile carrier network — no internet connection needed, no dropped VoIP calls, no app that failed to load. Calls come in 100%. We can also forward to your existing phone system or SaaS tool if you prefer, but for healthcare our recommendation is always the mobile network for maximum reliability.

We can activate a new healthcare line and route it to your team within 1 hour.

Some phone lines cannot fail — ever. We operate 24/7 critical lines including blood transplant hotlines, emergency incident numbers, and out-of-hours GP services. These lines are monitored around the clock and built on infrastructure designed for zero downtime.

Our system routes calls to whoever is on duty at any hour of the day or night. If the primary contact does not answer, the call escalates automatically to the next person in the chain. No call is ever lost. No voicemail is ever the final stop for an urgent case.

We also keep emergency numbers in reserve that can be activated within minutes — ready for unexpected incidents, public health emergencies, or sudden surges in demand.

Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands runs multiple emergency lines and blood transplant hotlines through our platform. On our team dashboard, hospital staff can change which doctor is on call at any time — day or night, weekday or weekend.

LUMC chose CallFactory for one critical reason: we do not rely on apps or internet connections for incoming calls. Instead, we forward calls directly to the on-call doctor’s mobile phone through the mobile carrier network. It is a more expensive route than sending calls over the internet — but for a blood transplant call at 3am, the connection must be guaranteed. No dropped VoIP calls, no app that failed to load, no Wi-Fi dead spot in a hospital corridor.

This is the level of reliability we build for. And it is the same infrastructure we are now bringing to the UK healthcare market.

Larger organisations — GP federations, NHS trusts, hospital groups — often manage dozens of phone numbers across multiple sites, departments, and services. These numbers may have been set up at different times, by different teams, with different providers.

CallFactory consolidates everything onto one platform. One dashboard to manage all numbers, one invoice, and one team to call when something needs changing. We can audit your existing setup, rationalise unused numbers, and often reduce costs significantly in the process.

Route calls between sites based on time of day, department, or patient need. Add or remove lines as services change. Everything is managed centrally, with full visibility over call volumes and performance across the entire organisation.

Pharmacies providing weekend or bank holiday cover need a reliable way to be reached. A dedicated out-of-hours number with a welcome message and time-based routing ensures patients are directed correctly — whether the pharmacy is open, closed, or operating on reduced hours.

The same setup works for duty pharmacist rotas. Staff log in and out of the on-call page, and calls are automatically routed to whoever is covering. No need to update forwarding numbers manually each week.

Veterinary practices face many of the same challenges as GP surgeries — high call volumes during opening hours, after-hours emergency lines, and on-call rotas that change weekly. Our platform handles all of it.

Set up daytime routing to your reception team, after-hours routing to the duty vet, and a voicebot to triage non-urgent calls. Pet owners calling about emergencies are connected immediately; routine appointment requests go to voicemail and are followed up the next working day.

Bie Bijen is a veterinary practice in the Netherlands that runs a shared emergency line together with competing practices. At night and during weekends, when something happens with a pet, there is always a vet on duty — regardless of which practice the animal is registered at.

Every volunteer vet has their own login on our team dashboard, so each person can set their own availability. Last-minute changes to the roster are no problem: status updates are reflected in real time, and our routing adjusts instantly. If the on-call vet changes at 2am, the very next caller reaches the right person.

It is a great example of how competitors can collaborate on something that benefits everyone — the practices, the vets, and above all the pet owners who need urgent help outside office hours.

Healthcare telephony is not a 9-to-5 business, and neither are we. Our support mailbox is monitored evenings, nights, and weekends. Our team is on Slack with notifications on our mobile phones, so we stay in touch around the clock. For clients who want it, we set up a dedicated Slack channel so you can reach us instantly by message at any time. If a volunteer loses their password or a duty roster needs updating at midnight, there is always someone on our side to help.

When a medical emergency number is needed urgently, we activate first and ask questions later. We get the number live, make sure calls are routing correctly, and only once everything is under control do we sort out invoicing details. The patient comes first — the paperwork can wait.

For shared emergency lines used by a group of independent practices — like the Bie Bijen example above — we invoice each organisation separately for their share of the costs. No need for one practice to collect money from the others.

For hospitals, NHS trusts, and larger organisations that work with purchase orders, we put PO numbers on every invoice. Whatever your finance department requires, we accommodate it.

As you can see, we are specialists in healthcare telephony. That is because we are not a reseller — we operate our own IVR platform. When something needs changing, we change it ourselves. When a problem occurs, we can pinpoint it exactly, right down to the carrier level. If you are with a reseller, they have to phone their platform provider first, who then has to investigate, who then has to get back to them, who then gets back to you. In healthcare, that chain simply does not work.

Because we all love technology — and spend our free time tinkering with computers, telephones, IVR, and AI — there are always multiple colleagues online at any given moment. If something happens, someone is already there.

With other providers, you need strict and expensive SLAs to get this level of attention. And when something actually happens, the SLA often turns out to be just a piece of paper — support is still not there when you need it. Our “best effort” SLA is the best you can get: motivated team members who know the platform inside out and want to help you. Because we know that is the same thing you do when one of us, as a human being, needs care at the hospital or the dentist.

Our platform is not limited to hospitals and surgeries. It is also used by charities, support organisations, and helplines that rely on volunteers to provide critical phone-based support.

Narcotics Anonymous Netherlands runs a support line for people struggling with addiction. The line is staffed entirely by volunteers — sometimes up to 50 at a time — who form a virtual call centre from their own homes.

Each volunteer enters their phone number in our team dashboard when they are available. Our IVR system knows exactly who is on duty and routes incoming calls accordingly. When someone in need picks up the phone, they are connected to a volunteer who is ready to listen.

There is no office, no phone system, no fixed infrastructure. Just a phone number, a dashboard, and a team of people who want to help. CallFactory handles everything in between — reliably, around the clock, and at a scale that would be impossible with a traditional phone system.