As some patients may be aware, the appointment request triage form was unavailable for about 40 minutes on Tuesday 5th May 2026. We apologise for the disruption.
This issue was not specific to our practice as it was a national issue with the software provider (Accurx). Accurx is a software provider used by almost every practice in England, and their triage product is used by approximately half of practices nationally. On the whole, Accurx availability (‘uptime’) is very good, but as we use it for our appointment triage system patients are more likely to notice when it becomes unavailable.
A morning after a Bank Holiday weekend is usually the busiest time for GP practices so the timing of the outage was very unfortunate. We have ‘business continuity’ plans and processes in place to ensure the practice can continue functioning in system outages such as this but thankfully this outage was short and services were restored within 40 minutes.
As soon as we became aware of the issue we added a prominent notice to our practice website for visibility for patients and also added an update on to our telephone systems.
Whilst it is not necessarily intended for the public or patients, you can view the system status for Accurx‘s products here. As always, our team will review the incident and discuss if anything could have been done differently to maintain a smooth service during the outage.