Virtual Assistants for UK Healthcare Practices: A Compliance-First Guide
It is 7:10 p.m. on a Thursday in a four-consultant private clinic just off the Bristol ring road, and the practice manager is doing the thing she promised herself she would stop doing.
The clinic closed at six. She is still at the front desk because the answerphone log shows forty-one missed calls since Monday, and she has no idea how many of them were new patients. She knows what a new patient is worth. She does not know how many of them rang the clinic three miles away instead, at 2:40 p.m. on Tuesday, while both of the reception team were dealing with a walk-in and a card machine that had stopped talking to the practice management system.
Beside her keyboard there is a printed list of next week’s clinics with four slots pencilled out — patients who did not attend last month and have not rebooked, because nobody has had a spare twenty minutes to ring them. There is an insurer query about a claim submitted in April that has been sitting in a shared inbox since the 2nd of June. There is a folder on the shared drive called CQC EVIDENCE 2026 which contains, at last count, one incident log, three policies with review dates that expired in 2025, and a subfolder called NEW that is empty. And there is an email from the clinic’s data protection adviser asking whether the practice has completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment for the transcription tool one of the consultants started using in March.
None of this is clinical. None of it requires a medical degree, or ten years in dermatology, or the ability to read a histology report. All of it is the reason she has eaten dinner at nine o’clock four nights this week.
Here is the part that should bother anyone running a UK healthcare practice in 2026: this is not a discipline problem, and it is not a software problem. It is a staffing problem that has been wearing the costume of a discipline problem for about three years. And the practices that have quietly solved it — by putting a trained, contracted, supervised human being on the admin load instead of another app — are pulling away from the ones that haven’t at a rate that is genuinely startling once you put the numbers side by side.
The Year Healthcare Admin Changed Shape
Something structural happened to UK healthcare administration between late 2025 and mid-2026, and it happened in both the NHS and the independent sector at once.
In general practice, the shift was contractual. Since 1 October 2025, practices in England have been required to keep online consultation systems open throughout core hours — 8 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. — for routine appointments and administrative requests. The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have pointed to rising submission volumes as evidence that the policy is working: a peak of 9.6 million submissions in March 2026, and 8.4 million in April. The BMA, surveying more than 1,300 practices in England, read the same numbers very differently. Three-quarters of practices reported an increase in workload. Sixty-eight per cent reported a rise in stress. Over half said patient care had been negatively affected.
Volume was not the only problem. It was the kind of volume. The RCGP’s April 2026 report, Tackling the GP workload crisis, put a number on the work that arrives in a practice for reasons that have nothing to do with clinical need — rejected and redirected referrals, chasing information from services that should have sent it, navigating systems that do not talk to each other. The College estimated the average equivalent cost of this unnecessary workload at £410 per GP per day. Nearly three-quarters of GPs surveyed said excessive workload was compromising patient safety.
Meanwhile, in the independent sector, the pressure came from growth. The Private Healthcare Information Network recorded roughly 953,000 admissions to UK private hospitals in 2025 — the fourth consecutive record year — with insurance-funded activity at an all-time high of about 670,000 and self-pay at 283,000. The number of consultants practising privately reached nearly 13,400, up 2.9% on the year before.
More consultants. More patients. More payers, each with their own claim format. More self-funding patients who behave like consumers and expect to be treated like them.
Private admissions hit a record for the fourth year running while the admin function supporting them stayed roughly the same size. That gap is not a temporary squeeze. It is the new baseline.
And on top of both, the compliance floor moved. The Care Quality Commission’s Single Assessment Framework — still live through 2026 while four sector-specific replacements are consulted on and finalised — shifted independent providers from periodic inspection to continuous, evidence-led assessment. Ratings can now be updated whenever new evidence emerges. The old rhythm of preparing hard before an announced visit and relaxing afterwards stopped working. And on 5 February 2026, the international transfer provisions of the Data (Use and Access) Act commenced, introducing a new “data protection test” for transfers of personal data out of the UK.
Four things changed at once. The staffing model underneath them did not change at all.
What the Admin Load Is Actually Costing
Most practices do not measure this, which is exactly why it persists.
The phone. Research published in July 2026, drawing on a 2025 study of 142 UK businesses, found that 47% of first-time inbound calls to UK SMEs go unanswered. Sector-specific figures for healthcare are no better: UK dental practices typically miss 20–30% of inbound calls during peak periods and when staff are with patients. A February 2026 study tracking every call across a 26-location dental group for a month found 38% of calls simply missed — not diverted, not called back. Of the calls that were answered, only a quarter of new-patient enquiries converted into a booked appointment.
For a private physiotherapy clinic charging £65–£90 a session, the arithmetic on a handful of missed enquiries a week runs to £29,000–£37,000 a year. And the modern patient does not wait. Between 60% and 70% of callers who hit voicemail hang up without leaving a message; among under-45s it is over 80%. They ring the next clinic on the search results page.
The empty chair. NHS England estimated that patients did not attend around 16 million GP appointments in 2025 — roughly one in 23. At an average of £30 a slot, that is over £216 million in general practice alone, and more than a million GP hours. In outpatients, DNAs run at about 5.6% of appointments, with each unkept appointment costed at £120 or more and total annual wastage estimated at around £1 billion. In a private clinic there is no averaging: a no-show is a lost fee, an idle consultant, and a patient further down the list who would have taken the slot if anyone had rung them.
The people. The role that absorbs all of this is the practice manager, and the role is buckling. Surveys of UK practice managers have repeatedly found the same picture: near-universal increases in workload complexity, intensity and hours, and a majority who have recently contemplated leaving. One manager’s description of the job has stuck with a lot of people who read it: when she is not working, she spends her time worrying about the things she is not doing, prioritising only what is compulsory or paid, and fitting everything else in when she can.
The medical secretary market offers no relief. Average UK pay sits somewhere between about £22,500 and £27,500 depending on the source, with private practice in London advertising £30,000–£35,000 for an office-based role — and that is before employer National Insurance, auto-enrolment pension, holiday and sickness cover, a desk, and recruitment fees. Practices are not choosing not to hire. They are advertising and not filling.
One missed new-patient call is an annoyance. Two hundred of them a year, invisible because nobody counts them, is a second consultant’s salary walking out of the door.
Why Capable People Still Drop Things
It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because the usual diagnosis — “we need to be better organised” — sends practices off to buy another system rather than another person.
The front desk of a healthcare practice is one of the most interrupted working environments in the economy. Workplace analytics research through 2025 and 2026 has tracked the average uninterrupted focused work session down to around thirteen minutes, a fall of roughly 9% on 2023. Gloria Mark’s long-running work at UC Irvine puts the cost of a single interruption at just over 23 minutes to fully regain the original task.
Now apply that to a receptionist who is expected to answer the phone within three rings, greet arrivals, take payment, chase a histology report, action a consultant’s dictation, respond to an insurer query and update the recall list — all in the same eight hours, all interruptible by anyone who walks through the door.
The work does not get done badly because the person is careless. It gets done in fragments because the environment guarantees fragmentation. Recalls, DNA follow-up, evidence filing, claim chasing and policy review are all deferrable — nobody is standing in front of you asking for them — which means in an interrupt-driven role they are always the things that lose.
You cannot discipline your way out of an arithmetic problem. You can only add capacity that is structurally protected from the interruptions.
Compliance First: What You Can Delegate, and What You Cannot
This is the section that decides whether any of the above is actionable, so it is worth doing properly.
UK healthcare data is special category data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR. The ICO’s own sector figures have had health as the most-breached sector in the UK for several years running, with 3,820 self-reported personal data breaches between 2023 and Q1 2025. Enforcement is not theoretical: the ICO fined Advanced Computer Software Group £3.07 million in March 2025 following the 2022 ransomware attack that disrupted NHS 111 — the first fine it has issued against a data processor rather than a controller. Suppliers handling health data carry direct regulatory responsibility. And the regulator will act on a single individual’s data where the breach is serious enough; several recent reprimands involve one patient and one misdirected letter.
So the question is not “is outsourcing allowed?” The question is “what does a defensible arrangement look like?” In practice, five things:
1. A processor contract that actually says something. Article 28 terms, documented instructions, defined purposes, confidentiality obligations, sub-processor controls, security measures, breach notification timelines, and return-or-deletion at the end. Boilerplate is not evidence.
2. A DPIA before, not after. Special category data plus a new processing arrangement is squarely in DPIA territory. The assessment should name the systems the assistant will touch, the fields they will see, and the fields they will not.
3. Least privilege, and prove it. Role-based access in the practice management system. No shared logins. No local copies. Access to the booking diary and the correspondence queue does not require access to the full clinical record, and an access model that can be shown to an assessor is worth more than an assurance that can’t.
4. A lawful transfer route. South Africa does not hold UK adequacy, so a transfer safeguard is required — typically the ICO’s International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum, supported by a transfer risk assessment. Since 5 February 2026, that assessment applies the DUAA’s new data protection test: whether the standard of protection in the destination country is not materially lower than the UK equivalent. South Africa’s POPIA is architecturally close to the UK regime — data subject rights, purpose limitation, security safeguards, accountability, and its own onward-transfer restrictions under section 72 requiring “substantially similar” protection. This is a documentation exercise with a defensible answer, not a leap of faith. But it is an exercise you must actually complete, and keep.
5. A hard scope boundary. This is the one practices get wrong.
A virtual assistant does not triage. Does not give clinical advice, including reassurance that sounds like advice. Does not decide clinical urgency. Does not sign off coding, or make the final decision on a claim. Does not amend a clinical record on their own judgement. Does not handle a safeguarding disclosure beyond immediate escalation under a written protocol. Clinical accountability stays with the clinician, controller accountability stays with the practice, and CQC registration stays with the registered manager.
Delegating the task is not delegating the accountability. Any provider that lets you believe otherwise is selling you a liability, not a service.
What is left after those exclusions is still enormous — and it is precisely the work that is currently being done at 7 p.m. by someone who should have gone home at six.
The Six Workflows Practices Actually Hand Over
Patient communications. Inbound and outbound: the callback queue, the shared inbox, the online consultation admin requests that are genuinely administrative, appointment confirmations, pre-appointment instructions, and the post-appointment “did you receive your letter” chase. Handled against a scripted protocol, with a documented escalation rule for anything clinical, distressed or safeguarding-adjacent.
Scheduling, recalls and DNA recovery. Building and defending the clinic diary. Working the cancellation list so a slot released on Tuesday is filled by Wednesday. Multi-channel reminders. Ringing every DNA within twenty-four hours — not to reprimand, but to rebook, which is the single highest-return admin activity in most practices and almost never gets done consistently.
Referral and correspondence workflow. Tracking referrals out and results back. Formatting and issuing clinic letters from clinician-approved content. Chasing the imaging report that was promised a fortnight ago. Keeping a live log of what is outstanding and who is waiting on whom.
Billing, insurer claims and self-pay. Preparing claims for clinician review, submitting to the right portal in the right format, monitoring rejections, chasing shortfalls, issuing and reconciling self-pay invoices, and running an aged-debt report that someone actually looks at.
Governance and CQC evidence. Maintaining the evidence layer the Single Assessment Framework expects: policy review calendar, staff training and acknowledgement logs, DBS and registration expiry tracking, incident log upkeep, complaint acknowledgement within timescale, audit scheduling, and an action tracker showing who owns what and by when. Assessors do not ask whether you have a policy. They ask you to show how the practice works day to day — which is an evidence problem, and evidence problems are solved by someone whose job it is to file things on the day they happen.
Data hygiene and reporting. Deduplicating patient records, correcting contact details (the root cause of a surprising share of misdirected-correspondence breaches), maintaining the recall register, and producing a weekly one-page operational report: calls answered and missed, conversion, DNA rate, slot utilisation, days-to-claim-submission, outstanding evidence items.
That last one changes the conversation permanently. Most practices are running blind on every number in that list.
The Human in the Loop
Now, the obvious objection: why hire a person for any of this in 2026 when there is an AI tool for each line?
Because the sector that has looked hardest at this question has come back with the clearest answer, and the answer is supervision.
The evidence for AI’s usefulness in healthcare admin is real and substantial. The Microsoft 365 Copilot pilot across more than 30,000 NHS staff in 90 organisations, reported in October 2025, found an average saving of 43 minutes per staff member per day — around five working weeks a year, or more than 400,000 hours a month at national scale. Nobody serious is arguing that these tools should be ignored.
But look at what the regulators did next.
NHS England now advises that only AI scribe products with regulatory authorisation as medical devices should be used in NHS settings, and launched an Ambient Voice Technology Supplier Registry in early 2026 to bring order to what was frankly a Wild West market. Its clinical guidance, first published in April 2025 and updated to Version 2 in April 2026, sits alongside information governance guidance published in March 2026 with a template DPIA, developed with the Information Commissioner’s Office and the National Data Guardian. AVT products are classed as medical devices, usually Class IIa or IIb, with MHRA risk classification treating generative outputs as high-risk and requiring clinical safety officer review under DCB 0129 and DCB 0160.
And the central instruction, repeated everywhere: clinical responsibility remains with the healthcare professional. Outputs must be checked and corrected before they enter a patient record. Patients must be told, and may object.
The performance data explains why. A mixed-methods trial evaluation of ambient listening scribe technology in an outpatient setting found that 58% of scribe outputs were accepted without modification into the electronic note. The technology produced accurate summaries, improved note quality and improved both clinician and patient experience — a genuinely good result. It also produced some evidence of hallucination and incorrect outputs.
Read that as an operations manager rather than a technologist. Fifty-eight per cent unmodified means forty-two per cent needed a human to change something. That is not automation. That is drafting with mandatory review — and the review is the part that carries the risk.
The same logic runs through the rest of the stack. An AI receptionist will answer the phone at 8:55 p.m., which is worth having. It will not notice that the woman ringing about a “routine” follow-up has now called three times in four days and sounded different each time. It will not decide that a message needs to reach a clinician before the end of surgery rather than tomorrow. It will not spot that an insurer’s rejection code is technically correct but commercially disputable. It will not read the tone of a complaint and realise that this one needs the registered manager, today.
Fifty-eight per cent of AI scribe outputs went into the record unmodified. The other forty-two per cent is a person’s job, and it is the job that decides whether the record is accurate.
The right model is not human or machine. It is a trained human operating good software inside a defined protocol, with a named person accountable for the output. In a sector where a misdirected letter is a reportable breach and an unchecked note is a clinical safety incident, the supervision layer is not overhead. It is the product.
The South African Advantage
Which raises the practical question: where do you find a trained administrator who can run this at a cost a four-consultant clinic can absorb, without shipping patient data into a jurisdiction that makes your transfer risk assessment unanswerable?
For UK healthcare, South Africa is an unusually good fit, and for four separate reasons.
The working day is the same working day
South Africa sits at GMT+2 — one to two hours ahead of the UK, with no daylight-saving drift to manage twice a year. That means complete overlap with the British clinic day. Nine o’clock in London is eleven in Cape Town. A consultant’s dictation handed over at the end of Tuesday’s list is formatted and back before Wednesday morning surgery.
Compare that with the Philippines at GMT+8: seven to eight hours ahead, effectively no live overlap with UK hours. Every clarification — “is this the same patient?”, “do you want me to hold this claim?” — costs a full day. In a workflow made almost entirely of small clarifications, that is fatal. South African BPO providers regularly point out that UK buyers get full real-time overlap with no night-shift surcharge, and it is the single most-cited reason UK mid-market teams choose the country.
The English is the right English
Patient-facing communication is where offshore administrative support usually fails, and it fails on register rather than vocabulary. British healthcare communication runs on understatement, hedging and formality — “I’m just ringing to see whether Tuesday still suits” rather than “I wanted to reach out about your upcoming visit.” Get it wrong in a clinical setting and you do not merely sound foreign; you sound as though the practice has outsourced its patients.
South Africa ranks around 13th globally on the EF English Proficiency Index, with adult literacy above 91% and more than 220,000 university graduates a year. The professional English is native-level and the accent is neutral. More usefully, South African business culture inherited the same understated, formal register British patients expect. VAConnect matches specifically for British English proficiency and UK business communication norms on client-facing roles — which is why the UK client feedback tends to sound like Jonathan Perry’s verified Clutch review: British English, our timezone, professional as any in-house hire, admin team reduced from three to one, VA still in post after twenty months.
Genuine healthcare-administration depth
This is the part people miss. South Africa is not a generalist offshore market that happens to take healthcare work; it has a substantial, mature healthcare BPO sector. Providers there run medical billing, claims processing, patient engagement and telehealth support at scale for international clients, and the sector holds international compliance certifications — HIPAA for US healthcare-adjacent work, PCI-DSS for card data — as a commercial prerequisite rather than an optional extra. The market matured enough in 2026 that a US healthcare engagement business acquired a South African healthcare BPO outright to secure the delivery base.
The BPESA/InvestSA GBS Investor Handbook reports South African providers delivering 18% higher customer satisfaction than comparable operations in India and the Philippines — a difference that shows up in first-contact resolution and escalation volumes rather than in marketing decks. For a healthcare practice, that translates into a person on the phone who can hear that a patient is anxious and adjust, which no script and no model reliably does.
Cost versus quality — and why “cheap” is the expensive option
The comparison that matters is fully loaded. A UK medical secretary at an average of roughly £22,500–£27,500, or £30,000–£35,000 in London private practice, costs materially more once you add employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, sick cover, recruitment fees and a desk. Then add the cost you cannot invoice: the six weeks the post sits empty, and the six weeks after that while a new person learns your systems.
Managed South African support typically lands 50–65% below the onshore equivalent, with VAConnect’s published pricing starting from $1,088 a month for a dedicated assistant.
But the argument is not the discount. It is what the discount buys in a market with high graduate unemployment: positive selection. VAConnect receives over 2,000 applications a month and extends offers to fewer than 3% — its published Jan–Sep 2024 audit shows 11,240 applications processed against 418 offers. In the UK, £24,000 for a medical secretary role buys you whoever applied. In South Africa, the equivalent budget buys you someone who beat several hundred other graduates to the position and intends to keep it. For healthcare roles the requirement is prior healthcare or regulated-industry administrative experience, not general office experience — because the difference between an administrator who has handled patient correspondence and one who hasn’t shows up in the first week.
And a single misdirected letter containing special category data is a reportable breach. Against that, the cheapest possible administrator is the most expensive decision on the table.
Managed, Not Matched — Why the Model Matters More Than the Match
Every point above collapses if the arrangement is a freelancer on a marketplace.
A freelancer is a single point of failure with no cover, no supervisor, no training pipeline, no HR record, and no counterparty to sue if patient data leaves through their personal laptop. In a regulated setting, that is not a cost saving; it is an unmitigated risk sitting inside your DPIA.
VAConnect has run the managed model since 2014, having started life in 2008 as Lime Tree Consulting, and is now the largest managed VA agency in Africa with over 100,000 delivered hours and a support team of 25-plus behind the placements. The operational difference is structural: assistants are recruited through a dedicated sourcing pipeline with skills testing and background checks; trained through VAVarsity before they touch a client system; supported by the Atomic Energy wellbeing programme and the two-way VAPIness feedback structure; and reviewed on performance by a named account manager rather than left to sink. Client retention sits at 98%. If a placement is not performing, VAConnect replaces them and manages the full transition — no fees, no friction — which means the practice does not absorb the cost of a bad hire twice.
For a healthcare practice, the operational redundancy is the headline. The SOP library built during onboarding means a stand-in can hold the desk during leave, rather than the work simply stopping — which is exactly the failure mode most practices have already lived through with their in-house secretary’s annual leave.
The First 90 Days
Weeks 1–2 — Scope and paperwork. Agree what is in and out. Complete the DPIA. Execute the processor agreement and transfer safeguard. Set role-based access. Write the escalation protocol for clinical, distressed and safeguarding contacts, and get it signed off by the clinical lead.
Weeks 3–4 — Shadow and document. The assistant works alongside your existing team, building SOPs for each workflow in your words and your systems. Expect meaningful output on the phone queue and the DNA list inside the first fortnight — these are the fastest wins and the easiest to supervise.
Weeks 5–8 — Own and measure. Handover of scheduling, correspondence tracking and claim preparation. The weekly operational report starts. This is usually the point where a practice discovers its real missed-call rate, and it is usually two to three times what anyone guessed.
Weeks 9–12 — Extend. Governance and evidence work moves across. Policy review calendar becomes live rather than aspirational. By the end of the quarter, the practice manager is managing the practice instead of covering the desk.
One honest caveat: recalls and reactivation compound over months, not days. The phone answers itself from week two. The revenue effect of a properly worked recall list shows up in the second quarter.
The Competitive Gap
The uncomfortable conclusion is how unevenly this is distributed.
Two comparable clinics, same specialty, same catchment, same fee structure. One answers 53% of first-time calls, loses one appointment in twenty to no-shows nobody rings back, submits claims when someone finds a gap, and assembles CQC evidence in a panic. The other answers nearly everything, rebooks DNAs within a day, submits claims within forty-eight hours, and can produce the evidence for any quality statement in under ten minutes because a named person files it the day it happens.
Neither practice is better at medicine. One of them just stopped asking clinically trained, patient-facing people to do administrative work in the gaps between patients, and hired someone to do it properly. The gap between them compounds every single week — and in a market where private admissions have set records four years running and NHS practices are absorbing an extra nine million online submissions a month, it compounds fast.
The compliance case for doing this correctly is now well-mapped: processor terms, DPIA, least privilege, a transfer route that satisfies the DUAA test, and a scope boundary that never touches clinical judgement. The operational case has been obvious for years. What has actually changed is that the excuse ran out.
Book a call with VAConnect to discuss a compliance-first virtual assistant for your practice — GMT+2 aligned, British-English matched, healthcare-experienced, and fully managed.
DIY / In-House Scramble vs Generic Freelancer or AI Tool vs VAConnect Managed Healthcare VA
| Dimension | DIY / In-House Scramble | Generic Freelancer or AI Tool | VAConnect Managed Healthcare VA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound call answer rate | Typically 50–70%; unmeasured | AI answers volume, misses nuance and urgency | Consistently high, with escalation protocol for clinical/distress calls |
| DNA follow-up | Deferred; often never happens | Automated reminder only, no rebooking conversation | Every DNA contacted within 24 hours and rebooked |
| Recall and reactivation | Aspirational | Bulk messaging, no judgement | Worked as a standing weekly task with a tracked list |
| Insurer claims and self-pay | Submitted when someone finds time | Freelancer unfamiliar with UK payer formats | Prepared for clinician review, submitted, rejections chased |
| CQC evidence layer | Assembled in a panic before assessment | Not covered | Filed the day it happens; live action tracker |
| UK GDPR processor terms | N/A (in-house) | Often absent or boilerplate | Article 28 terms, defined instructions, sub-processor controls |
| DPIA and transfer route | Frequently incomplete | Client left to work it out alone | DPIA support; IDTA/Addendum plus TRA under the DUAA test |
| Special category data handling | Ad hoc; shared logins common | Personal device, personal account, no audit trail | Least-privilege access, NDAs, secure environment, audit trail |
| Timezone overlap with UK | Full | Varies; Philippines GMT+8 gives near-zero live overlap | GMT+2 — full UK working-day overlap, no DST drift |
| Patient-facing English and register | Native | Highly variable | Matched for British English and UK communication norms |
| Healthcare admin experience | Depends entirely on the hire | Rarely | Required at selection, not taught afterwards |
| Cover during leave or illness | Nobody | Nobody | SOP library plus managed stand-in |
| If it isn’t working | Redundancy process, months | Ghosting; start again | Free replacement, managed transition — no fees, no friction |
| Time to productive | 8–14 weeks after a 6-week vacancy | Immediate but unsupervised | Live within days; meaningful output in week one, full ramp 2–4 weeks |
| Fully loaded cost | £22.5k–£35k plus NI, pension, cover, desk, recruitment | Low headline rate, high management and risk cost | From $1,088/month, managed, with recruitment risk carried by VAConnect |
Sources referenced in this article include: BMA analysis of pressures in general practice (May 2026); RCGP, “Tackling the GP workload crisis” (April 2026); Private Healthcare Information Network market updates (March and June 2026); ICO enforcement records and sector breach data; NHS England guidance on AI-enabled ambient scribing products (April 2025, updated April 2026) and accompanying information governance guidance (March 2026); a peer-reviewed mixed-methods trial evaluation of ambient listening scribe technology in outpatients; the Data (Use and Access) Act international transfer provisions in force 5 February 2026; UK missed-call research (July 2026) and healthcare-sector call studies (February 2026); Glassdoor, Indeed and Jobted UK salary data for medical secretaries (2026); BPESA/InvestSA GBS Investor Handbook and South African BPO sector data (2026); and VAConnect published company and client data (vaconnect.co.uk / vaconnect.co.za).