A patient works in an open plan office. Her phone rings, the screen shows the clinic's name, and three colleagues look up. She has told nobody anything.
Nothing confidential was said. The call itself was the disclosure, and nobody had ever asked her how she would prefer to be reached.
The checklist
Ask these once, record them, and honour them.
1. The preferred method
Telephone, text, email or a portal. People have genuine preferences and being asked is itself reassuring.
2. Which number
A mobile, a home number or neither. Some patients want nothing on a shared landline and will not volunteer that unprompted.
3. Whether a voicemail may be left
And what it may say. A message naming the clinic is a disclosure in many households, and the default should be agreed rather than assumed.
4. Whether the clinic name may be used
On voicemails, texts, letters and envelopes. Discreet contact is a common request and it is easily accommodated once somebody asks.
5. What times are suitable
Working hours, evenings, or particular days. A patient in meetings all morning is not avoiding you.
6. Whether a partner may be told
Named, with what they may be told and what they may not. It should be recorded and it should be changeable.
7. What happens if somebody else answers
A stated approach, so that whoever makes the call knows what to say. It is the moment where privacy is most often lost.
8. Whether post is safe
Shared households, house shares and family homes where letters are opened by somebody else. Plain envelopes matter and patients should be able to ask.
9. How results are delivered
Telephone, appointment or portal, and whether the patient can choose. Nobody should receive significant news at a moment they did not choose.
10. How appointments are confirmed
Text, email or letter, and whether reminders can be discreet. Patients keep phones on a kitchen table and a reminder is visible to anybody.
11. How to change a preference
Easily, at any time, without explaining why. Circumstances change and the record should follow rather than being set once at registration.
12. Who inside the clinic sees it
That the preference is visible to everybody who would make contact. A recorded preference that one department ignores is worse than none.
12b. What happens when something is urgent
A preference for text only becomes a problem when a clinician needs to speak to somebody today. Explaining that urgent clinical matters may need a call regardless, and agreeing a fallback number for exactly those occasions, means a preference is honoured without anybody being unreachable when it matters.
12c. Say what the clinic will never do
That nobody will discuss a patient's care with somebody who rings claiming to be a relative, and that no clinical detail is sent by text or email unless the patient has asked for it. Stating the limits is what makes the preferences feel like a policy rather than a courtesy.
13. Publish the policy
So patients know they may ask, which is the reassurance in first enquiries to a fertility clinic handled with care and the administrative ground in clinic websites and the admin questions patients ask first.
14. Keep the details current
Because out of date contact details are what cause missed communications years later, as in storage and consent questions patients ask later.
Getting started
Publish your contact policy and ask every patient their preference, building the page with the AI FAQ generator, then capture and update preferences at any hour, the same way bookings work in how chiropractic clinics book new patients with a chatbot. SpideyChat for clinics answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.