Organise your users into groups, aligned with the surgery teams they're in. In Surgery Connect, telephone numbers and short dials can be associated with groups. That way, anyone in the group can answer - and when they do, they hear a message before the call is connected - called a whisper - telling them it's a call to the group

You can create new Groups for both internal and external calls, and manage the members of the Group

Groups will be set up with default settings that can be changed in the Configuration Console. For example, inbound calls are normally distributed by calling the member of the Group who hasn't made or received a call for the longest - longest idle (default). Longest idle is recommended to get the best of Surgery Connect, however these settings can be changed

Navigate to the Service Delivery Console

Select the groups tab

When you access the Groups list, you will see this table:

The data in the table can be sorted by clicking on the column header to sort by that column. For example, click on the Short Dial column header to sort by numerical order and see the highest allocated Group Short Dial number

The Group Name is displayed in the first column

The Short Dial is shown in the second column. This is the number allocated as the Group's internal contact number

When making an internal call to the Group Short Dial, the call will go through the same queue as the patients, so you may join a queue if the Users are all busy. When you reach the front of the queue, the call will go to the next available User (unless the default call distribution has been changed in the Configuration Console)

The third column shows the Members in each group. These are the Users that will be able to answer calls for that group

Click the Edit icon to change any of the information in the table for that group, including adding and removing members

Click the Copy Group Members icon to copy the selection of members for another group. This is useful if you have the same Users answering different types of calls, as it saves adding them all manually to the new group

Click + Add New Group to create a new group

At the bottom of the table, you can change the number of rows shown per page, and navigate between other pages