Since July, every call to Newbury Street Practice in Wantage, Oxfordshire, has passed through an AI triage system called Andi before it can reach a human receptionist.
Patients have begun describing it as a barrier rather than a service.
What patients say
Jo Rogers said the bot "puts you off ever bothering" contacting the practice. She described waiting in a phone queue for 20 minutes, after which "he decided he couldn't help me". She called getting past it "AI Andy's wall".
Tricia Lockhart, 65, said she was left frustrated after the system thought she was "calling about pregnancy". "Quite an achievement for a 65-year-old," she said.
John Allinson put the objection more bluntly: "AI is all about cutting costs and saving money." The practice disputes that.
What the surgery says
A spokesperson said the majority of feedback had been positive, and that the purpose was "to improve access, increase capacity and allow staff to spend more time supporting patients who are unable or choose not to use our digital options". The practice's own introduction says Andi "listens carefully, understands how you're feeling, and helps you get what you need quickly".
Local MP Olly Glover said surgeries "like many others, are trying to streamline their administrative processes", adding: "There is clearly pressure on primary care services across our constituency, where we have seen high levels of housing growth. Successive governments have not taken the need to provide health and other infrastructure ahead of new homes seriously enough."
The design decision underneath the complaints
The specific failures here are ordinary — a system mishearing, a queue, an unhelpful outcome. What makes them matter is one choice: every call goes through it, with no way round.
Compare that with the ambulance service trialling AI note-taking, covered here two days ago. That system listens and writes; a clinician reviews every note before it is filed; the patient's path to care is untouched. Eight weeks, 38 staff, one task.
The difference is not the quality of the AI. It is whether the AI sits beside the human process or in front of it. Put it in front and every error becomes an obstacle to care rather than a draft someone corrects.
What it means in Bangladesh
Call triage is one of the likeliest AI deployments in Bangladeshi healthcare, because the pressure it answers is real: a hospital line nobody picks up is a daily experience here, and an automated system that always answers looks like an obvious improvement on one that never does.
Two cautions from Wantage transfer directly.
The first is language. A system that misheard a 65-year-old English speaker in Oxfordshire will do substantially worse with Bangla, regional accents and a bad line — and the people most likely to be misheard are the elderly and the rural, who are also the least able to switch to the website instead.
The second is the fallback. Andi can pass a caller to a human, and the complaints are about how hard that is. Any such system here should be judged on one question before purchase: how does a caller reach a person, how fast, and does that route work when the caller cannot explain themselves to a machine?
Source: BBC News, via the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
