Appointments Booking Officer, Band 2

Job overview

Appointments Booking Officer, Band 2 (37.5 hours a week)

The main role of the Appointments Booking Officer is to answering inbound calls from patients and other service users. Following the Trust’s guidelines and confidentiality policies.

The Appointment Booking Officer will also be assisting the Specialist Bookers with the admin processes associated with clinic bookings. Provide an effective and efficient administrative support to the Central Booking Office (CBO).

Main duties of the job

Ability to communicate clearly with patients or other service users, provide information on a range of issues relating to their referral or appointment. The majority of this will be over the phone in a call centre type environment.

Respond to queries from colleagues or other staff relating to the clinic booking, via email/telephone/in person.

Ability to work with the well-established booking office guidelines and procedures, seek support from the booking office supervisors where necessary.

Intermediate IT skills and the ability to adapt with the IT systems used by the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. This will include various systems to be used alongside each other.

Deal with the Central Booking Office’s admin tasks in line with guidelines and processes.

To be familiar and work to the Trust’s policies and procedures such as confidentiality and security of data.

Please see job description for full requirements

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

To answer all incoming calls from patients, staff and other healthcare professionals. Ensure issues are escalated in a timely manner to the most appropriate team or supervisor following department processes. Booking patients into clinic slots, making changes to their existing appointment if required or cancel as requested ensuring the relevant letter is sent to the patient.

To manage the manual referrals coming to the booking office by post and add them to Trakcare within in the agreed timescale.

To support the Booking Specialists in maximising the slot utilisation. Follow the Trust’s patient access policy to ensure patients are booked appropriately.

To support the Booking Specialists in cancelling clinics at short notice and telephoning patients to inform.

Deal sensitively with any concerns or issues raised by patients and provide a high level of customer support.

To liaise with medical records where appropriate to ensure notes are available for patient’s clinic appointments.

To complete a large range of complex admin tasks selecting the appropriate process and following them accurately and efficiently.

Processing ERS transfers following various processes dependent upon the speciality.

Action clinicians triaging comments by selecting relevant services and sending details to patient to book appointments online.

Using various IT systems simultaneously. These include ERS, trakcare, excel.

Training new staff in the full Booking Assistant role including competencies sign off and escalating any issues with training to the supervisor. Identifying issues with both internal processes and external changes that impact the work of the CBO, escalating to the relevant staff members. Follow numerous CBO and trust wide processes and policies. Manage own workload to ensure that all tasks are completed within required timescales.

Undertake any other appropriate duties within the role, as required at the request of your Line Manager.