For many older residents in Ayr, booking a GP appointment online can feel impossibly daunting — our one-to-one digital support sessions are changing that.
Margaret, 74, had been phoning her GP surgery every morning for three weeks, joining a queue that sometimes stretched to forty minutes. When the surgery moved to an online booking system, she assumed it simply wasn't for her. "I don't really do computers," she told us when she first came through our door at Vibrant Health Advocates. Six weeks later, she books her own appointments in under two minutes from her phone.
Stories like Margaret's sit at the heart of what we do in Ayr. Our town has a higher proportion of residents over 65 than the Scottish national average, and a significant number of households — particularly in some of our coastal and rural fringes — have patchy broadband or no home internet at all. When NHS services shift online, the intention is efficiency and convenience. But for people who didn't grow up with smartphones and tablets, or who can't afford reliable connectivity, those same systems can feel like locked doors.
Our programme offers free, one-to-one appointments at our Ayr town centre base. A support worker sits alongside each person and works at their pace — no rushing, no jargon, no assumption that anything is obvious. We cover the basics: how to find the NHS Inform website, how to create or log in to a Patient Portal account, how to search for available appointment slots, and how to confirm a booking so it lands in a diary or gets written on a piece of paper by the fridge. We follow whatever method works best for the individual in front of us.
We also lend out simple tablets pre-loaded with bookmarked NHS pages, so that people who want to practise at home between sessions can do so without needing to navigate the open internet. Our plain-language guide — written by local people for local people, with font sizes that are actually readable — goes home with every participant.
Since launching the appointment-booking strand of our work eighteen months ago, we have supported more than 340 individuals across Ayr and the surrounding area. Around 60 per cent report feeling confident enough to complete the process independently after two sessions. The rest know they can come back as often as they need, without judgement.
The NHS digital transformation is not going to slow down. New services, new apps, and new patient-facing portals will keep arriving. Our job is to make sure that the residents of Ayr — whatever their age, confidence level, or broadband speed — are never left behind when their own healthcare moves online. Because access to a GP is not a digital privilege. It is a right.
If you or someone you know could benefit from one-to-one help with NHS digital services, please get in touch or simply drop into one of our sessions — no appointment needed.