How Tamatea Medical Centre Reduced Patient Wait Times From 20 Minutes to Under 3 [Webinar Recap]
It's Monday morning. Every phone line is ringing at once. Your receptionist is checking in a patient at the counter, fielding a question from a nurse, and watching the hold queue tick upward. Somewhere in that pile, a patient has now been waiting 45 minutes to speak to someone.
Eventually, they get in their car and drive in.
For Tamatea Medical Centre, that scene was routine. Patient wait times on their phone lines averaged 16 to 20 minutes across the working week. On heavy days, a caller could wait over an hour.
In this post, we're sharing the full recording of a recent Heron webinar featuring Mark Lee, General Manager at Tamatea Medical Centre, who walked through exactly what they tried, what worked, and what the numbers look like nine months in. Watch the recording below and read on for the key takeaways.
What You'll Learn
Why adding more receptionists didn't fix Tamatea's phone problem
How they went from a 16–20 minute average wait to under 3 minutes
What "naming the receptionist" did for patient adoption
The questions clinic managers asked: on AI, consent, language support, and clinical triage
How to think about whether a similar approach is right for your practice
The Problem: More Staff Wasn't the Answer
Tamatea Medical Centre is a 45-year-old suburban GP practice. Eight GPs, eight nurses, a couple of pharmacists, and a seven-person admin team — including three reception desks, a legacy of four originally separate practices merging over decades.
By any measure, it's a well-resourced clinic. And it still had a phone crisis.
Mark Lee came to the role of General Manager from outside primary healthcare. One of the first things he did was survey patients and staff — interviews, emails, focus groups — to find out where things were breaking down.
The answer was consistent: the phones.
Patients couldn't get through. When they did get through, they were sometimes bounced between the wrong people. Messages fell through the cracks. Follow-ups didn't happen. And by the time a frustrated patient finally reached someone, the tension they'd built up over a 40-minute hold didn't stay on the phone, it walked through the front door.
"You'd have all answering all six lines. But if you were the seventh person, you could be waiting 5 to 10 minutes. If you were the 20th person — waiting an hour." — Mark Lee, GM, Tamatea Medical Centre
The clinic had already tried the obvious fixes: hiring more reception staff, repositioning people, adding phone lines. Each helped at the margins. None resolved the core issue, they couldn't control the volume of calls that hit all at once, particularly on Monday mornings.
Why the "Add More People" Approach Hits a Wall
This is the part most clinics don't want to hear, because it means the solution isn't straightforward.
The inbound call problem at GP clinics is structural, not a staffing gap. Demand isn't evenly distributed across the day, it spikes hard first thing in the morning and again after lunch. You can't staff for the spike without overstaffing the quiet periods. And you can't expect receptionists to be simultaneously present at the desk, answering calls, and managing follow-up tasks without something giving way.
Mark described his reception team as the shock absorber between patients and clinicians, taking the impact every time something got bumpy. The harder the ride, the more the team absorbed. And the harder it becomes to retain good people in those roles.
The other cost is less visible but just as real: when your receptionists are buried in calls, the downstream work doesn't get done. Enrolled patients waiting for callbacks. Cancelled appointment slots sitting vacant. Admin tasks that require quiet focus getting squeezed into the margins of the day, or not at all.
What Tamatea Actually Changed
After reviewing the data from their patient and staff surveys, Tamatea Medical Centre brought Heron into their workflow as their patient communications platform. The goal wasn't to replace their reception team, it was to give that team capacity to do their jobs properly.
Before going live, they ran over 100 internal test calls across doctors, nurses, and reception staff. Partners called the test line. People tried to break it, asking about buying chickens, throwing unusual edge cases, seeing where it would stumble. Anything that didn't work got fixed before a single patient encountered it.
They also spent significant time in configuration: setting opening hours, after-hours handling, emergency escalation paths, immunisation workflows, and how to handle same-day appointment requests.
Then they did something that stood out: they named the receptionist Scout.
The name came from a staff competition. They chose it because Scout is gender-neutral — important for a clinic with a gender-affirming care practice on site — and because a scout is someone who goes ahead, breaks ground, and helps others navigate safely. They introduced Scout through newsletters, in-practice TV screens, and social media, framing the new addition as a trainee receptionist the team and patients could help improve.
That framing did something unexpected. It lowered the stakes for the human team, too. If Scout made a mistake, it wasn't a crisis — it was a learning. Mark noted that the psychological safety it created around mistakes and continuous improvement was a genuine, unplanned benefit.
The Results, Nine Months In
The numbers are significant.
Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Average patient wait time | 16–20 minutes | Under 3 minutes |
Maximum wait time | 60+ minutes | Under 10 minutes |
Patients driving in out of frustration | Regular occurrence | Zero |
Patients using Scout directly | — | ~Two-thirds |
Two-thirds of Tamatea's patients now engage directly with Scout for their calls. The human reception queue runs at under 3 minutes on average. The clinic's longest wait in any scenario is now under 10 minutes.
That last point matters most, perhaps. The patients who used to sit on hold for an hour, build up tension, and then arrive at reception already frustrated? That no longer happens. It's been reduced to zero.
There have also been softer wins. Mark mentioned a patient who sent in a thank-you balloon and chocolates, crediting Scout's handling of an emergency call with potentially saving their life. Doctors and nurses have noticed a shift in the mood of patients arriving for consultations.
One-third still prefer a human, and that's fine
Mark was clear on this in the webinar: not every patient has adopted Scout, and the clinic isn't trying to push them to. Some patients, particularly those with hearing or speech disabilities, find voice-based communication tools genuinely difficult to use. The clinic's position is simple: if you'd prefer to speak to a person, press two.
The point isn't 100% adoption. It's about getting enough of the straightforward calls — cancellations, repeat prescription requests, appointment bookings — handled without a human in the loop, so the humans can focus on the calls that actually need them.
What Clinic Managers Asked
During the Q&A, clinic managers raised questions worth covering here:
Will patients actually use it? Adoption builds over time. Tamatea saw steady growth over nine months. The key was framing Scout as an addition to the team, not a barrier, and making sure staff knew how to redirect patients who struggled.
Can it support other languages? Yes. Heron currently supports Mandarin, with Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean in progress. The platform can be configured so patients choose their language in the initial menu, or it can detect the language being spoken and respond accordingly.
How do you handle patient consent? Tamatea updated their enrolment form, communicated the change via email and social media, and introduced Scout as part of a broader AI adoption window. The consent process was handled proactively, not buried in fine print, but communicated openly as a new part of how the clinic works.
Does it do clinical triage? No. Heron handles non-clinical administrative tasks only. For emergency situations, Scout advises the patient to call 111 immediately and does not attempt to assess clinical urgency. That remains with your clinical team.
Is Your Clinic Ready for a Similar Conversation?
If your phones are your biggest source of staff frustration, patient complaints, and missed follow-ups, Tamatea's experience is worth sitting with.
The technology isn't the hard part. The hard part is being clear about what problem you're actually trying to solve, designing the workflows carefully before go-live, and giving your team, and your patients, time to adapt.
Mark's advice: use data to understand the pain, don't expect perfection on day one, name it, treat it like a trainee, and lean into the feedback loop.
Talk to the Heron team about your call volume, your current phone setup, and how the platform would work in your specific clinic environment.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take for a GP clinic to reduce patient wait times with a communications platform? Results vary depending on clinic size, call volume, and how thoroughly the platform is configured before go-live. Tamatea Medical Centre saw average wait times drop from 16–20 minutes to under 3 minutes within their first nine months, with improvements visible from early in the rollout as patient adoption grew.
Will patients accept talking to an automated system at a GP clinic? Many will — particularly for straightforward tasks like booking, cancelling, or requesting callbacks. Tamatea found roughly two-thirds of patients now engage directly with Scout, their named patient communications receptionist. The remaining third still prefer a human, and the clinic accommodates both. The key is introducing the change clearly, not forcing adoption.
Does an automated patient communications platform handle clinical triage? No — and it shouldn't. These platforms are scoped to non-clinical administrative tasks: appointment scheduling, prescription request intake, follow-up callbacks, and routing. Clinical triage decisions remain with qualified clinical staff. Emergency situations are handled by directing patients to call 111 immediately.
Can patient communications software support multiple languages? Yes. Platforms designed for diverse clinic communities can be configured to offer language options in the initial call menu. Heron currently supports Mandarin and is adding Portuguese, Spanish, and Korean — useful for clinics with high Māori, Pasifika, or migrant patient populations.
What's the best way to introduce a new patient communications tool to clinic patients? Tamatea's approach is worth copying: introduce it as a new team member, give it a name, explain it's learning, and communicate the change proactively through newsletters, in-practice screens, and email. Framing it as an addition to the team — not a replacement — made a measurable difference to patient acceptance.
