What the assistant must refuse to assess, and how it refuses

The line is between describing the service and assessing the person

An assistant may state what a clinic treats, how long an appointment takes, what a procedure involves, what preparation is required and when the next slot is. It must not say what a described symptom indicates, whether it is urgent, whether it is probably nothing, or which specialist is appropriate for it. The first set is information about the clinic; the second is a clinical judgement about an individual. Write the line down in those terms before evaluating any vendor, because every vendor will claim to respect a line you have not defined.

"Probably nothing" is the failure that will not look like one

The dangerous output is not an alarming answer - alarming answers get escalated and reviewed. It is reassurance. A patient who describes chest tightness and is told it is commonly muscular may not call anyone, and nothing in the logs will record that as an incident. Ask any vendor what their assistant does with a symptom description and listen specifically for whether it ever reassures. If it can reassure, it can reassure wrongly, and that failure is silent.

Emergency wording has to be fixed text, not generated

For the small set of descriptions that must trigger an emergency response, the response cannot be composed fresh each time. It has to be the clinic's own wording, reviewed by someone clinical, emitted verbatim, with the local emergency number for the patient's region rather than a generic one. A generated emergency message is a message nobody approved, which is the opposite of what an emergency path is for. Require the vendor to show you where that text is stored and who can change it.

Refusing well is a skill, and most refusals are bad

"I cannot help with that" loses the patient. A good refusal does three things in one breath: declines the assessment explicitly, says who can make it, and offers the next concrete step - the earliest appointment, the direct number, the out-of-hours route. The difference between a refusal that routes a patient and one that abandons them is entirely in the wording, so make the wording part of what you evaluate rather than something configured later.