Thousands of patients have been unable to access their GP surgery online after Silicon Practice collapsed into administration, disrupting the silicon practice administration in England GP service for some practices. Some services, including whole websites, online consultations and chatbots, are no longer running.
Patients at affected practices have been told to contact their surgery by phone or in person if the website is unavailable. Swansea Bay Health Board said it knew of three practice websites that had ceased to operate after the third-party company that provided them entered administration.
Swansea Bay Health Board notice
On October 27, Swansea Bay Health Board said the three affected practices were Mount Surgery in Port Talbot, Castle Surgery in Neath and Victoria Gardens Surgery in Neath. It said the websites will cease to operate and that any notice would be very short.
The board also said practices using Silicon's services should tell patients they will not have access to online consultation requests. NHS England has contacted affected practices with advice on keeping services running and limiting the impact on patient care.
Three practices in Swansea Bay
The disruption is not limited to Swansea Bay. Practices in Gloucestershire and London have also faced problems, while fewer than 10% of the around 6,000 practices in England are affected.
That leaves most GP websites running as normal, but affected practices have lost one of the main ways patients reach them remotely. The loss matters most where patients had relied on online consultation requests or a website chatbot instead of calling.
FootFall and next steps
Silicon Practice also ran FootFall, which was advertised as reducing patient phone calls to practices by 30% and as working in more than 1,000 GP practices across the UK. For patients at the practices named by Swansea Bay Health Board, the immediate fallback is simple: use the phone or attend in person while the practice works through an alternative online consultation provider.
The question now is which services each affected practice can replace and how quickly. Until that is in place, patients trying to use the website route will need to switch to the older contact methods the practices have told them to use.
