Relay is not an emergency or crisis-monitoring service
Relay is the tool the practice’s staff use to coordinate work between themselves: referrals, letters, follow-up bookings, and messages to one another. Nobody watches it around the clock, and nothing in it is designed to reach a person in an emergency.
In an emergency
If a patient is in immediate danger, or you are, call emergency services first. Then follow the practice’s own clinical escalation policy: speak to the treating clinician directly, by telephone or in person. A message in Relay is not that call, and nobody is waiting on the other end of one.
What Relay does not do
- It is not monitored
- Messages, tasks, and flags are read when a member of staff is at their desk with Relay open. There is no on-call coverage through Relay, no paging, and nobody reads it after hours.
- Its notifications are not guaranteed
- A notification reaches a browser that is open and a session that is still signed in. A closed laptop, an expired session, a muted device, or a lost connection means it is not seen until the person returns.
- It has no patient-facing side
- Patients cannot write to Relay, and Relay never contacts a patient. Appointment reminders, portal messages, and prescriptions live in the practice’s record system, not here.
- It does not read the chart in real time
- Relay reads the practice’s scheduling and coverage records on a schedule, and only while somebody is signed in. What it shows can be minutes behind, and it shows nothing clinical.
What this means for staff
- Do not use a Relay message or task for anything that needs an answer within minutes. Pick up the phone or walk over.
- Do not leave a safety concern about a patient in a message and assume it has been seen. Tell the treating clinician directly, then record what you did in the chart.
- A referral’s safety flag makes it stand out on the board for whoever opens the board next. It does not alert anyone, and it does not replace the conversation above.
- If Relay is unavailable, the practice’s work continues in the record system and by telephone. Nothing about patient care depends on Relay being up.
What Relay is for
The ordinary work between visits: sending a referral to the right colleague, drafting and filing a letter, booking the follow-up a provider asked for, calling a patient who did not come, and asking a colleague a question that can wait until they are at their desk. It keeps a record of who did what and when, so that nothing between visits is dropped. That is the whole of it.