What a medical or dental receptionist is allowed to say on the phone

A practice's phone does four things: books, moves, cancels, and takes a call-back. None of those needs the receptionist to know what's wrong with the caller. So a Giday receptionist in restricted mode is told, in terms it cannot be talked out of:

• It does not discuss symptoms, conditions, diagnoses, medications, results, treatments or therapies. Not to describe, confirm, speculate, or even repeat back.
• If a caller starts describing what's wrong, it lets them finish being heard, then says kindly that it isn't the right person for the clinical side and will get them to someone who is.
• It gives no health advice of any kind. Not "that sounds fine", not "that can wait", not "you should come in". It says it isn't qualified if asked.
• Appointments, hours, location, parking, fees, cancellations and rescheduling are all fine. That's ordinary reception, and it does it normally.

The booking that lands in the practice's calendar carries the appointment type, never the symptom. The practice gives its receptionist its own list of appointment types — a check-up and clean, an initial consult, a follow-up, a review — and the receptionist picks the one that fits. If none fits it writes "appointment" and nothing else.

So the dentist knows the 9am is a check-up and clean. The dentist does not have "cavity, left side, hurts when cold" sitting in a calendar entry, which is the point.

A message about anything clinical says only that the caller would like a call back about a health matter, their name, their number, and one word on how soon: urgent or routine. If they said it's urgent, or they're in pain, the message is flagged priority and reaches the practice at once.

That one word is the compromise we settled on. A practice has to know which call to return first. It doesn't have to know why.

A practice can let callers ask for their own practitioner by name. Each practitioner has their own hours and their own calendar feed, and the receptionist books into the right diary and says "with Sarah on Thursday at ten" rather than "someone on Thursday".

Some practice systems, Best Practice and MedicalDirector among them, expose no calendar feed we can read. A practice on one of those runs its receptionist in requests-only mode: it takes the booking request — the name, the number, the appointment type and when suits — and texts and emails it to the desk, which makes the booking in the practice system. The caller is told the desk will confirm. Nothing is double-booked, because nothing is booked by the receptionist at all. The front-desk backup page has the rest.

In restricted mode no recording is kept and no transcript or written summary is kept. The practice gets the outcome, a booking or a message, and nothing else. Asked what happens to the call, the receptionist says so. The detail is on our data-handling page.

One rule outranks all of the above. If a caller describes danger to life or limb, the receptionist stops whatever it was doing. The practice chooses, at signup and on the settings page, how that call is handled:

1. Tell the caller to contact emergency services themselves, and text the owner at once. This is the default.
2. Put the caller through to the practice's own emergency contact first; if that rings out, the default.
3. Say the practice's own sentence first — their after-hours line, their crisis card — then the default.

Whichever the practice picks, the receptionist never contacts emergency services itself, never says help is on the way, and always texts the owner. It errs heavily on the side of acting.

Every word a receptionist writes down is a record the practice holds. A receptionist that writes down symptoms creates clinical records in a calendar and a text message, in a system the practice didn't choose for that. One that writes the appointment type and an urgency word creates nothing the practice has to protect. Less heard, less held, less to go wrong.

This isn't legal advice and it isn't clinical advice. It's how the product is built, and the practice's own obligations are the practice's to confirm. The sector pages: medical, dentists, physios, psychologists.