• Postgrad Med J · Jul 2022

    Clinician and patient experience of neurology telephone consultations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    • Tagore Nakornchai, Elena Conci, Anke Hensiek, and BrownJ William LJWL0000-0002-7737-5834Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK..
    • Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
    • Postgrad Med J. 2022 Jul 1; 98 (1161): 533538533-538.

    BackgroundTelephone consultations are already employed in specific neurological settings. At Cambridge University Hospitals, the COVID-19 pandemic initially prompted almost all face-to-face appointments to be delivered by telephone, providing a uniquely unselected population to assess.ObjectivesWe explored patient and clinician experience of telephone consultations; and whether telephone consultations might be preferable for preidentifiable subgroups of patients after the pandemic.MethodsClinicians delivering neurological consultations converted to telephone between April and July 2020 were invited to complete a questionnaire following each consult (430 respondents) and the corresponding patients were subsequently surveyed (290 respondents). The questionnaires assessed clinician and patient goal achievement (and the reasons for any dissatisfaction). Clinicians also described consultation duration (in comparison to face to face) while patients detailed comparative convenience and preference.ResultsThe majority of clinicians (335/430, 78%) and patients (227/290, 78%) achieved their consultation goals by telephone, particularly during follow-up consultations (clinicians 272/329, 83%, patients 176/216, 81%) and in some disease subgroups (eg, seizures/epilepsy (clinicians 114/122 (93%), patients 71/81 (88%)). 95% of telephone consultations were estimated to take the same or less time than an equivalent face-to-face consultation. Most patients found telephone consultations convenient (69%) with 149/211 (71%) indicating they would like telephone or video consultations to play some role in their future follow-up.ConclusionTelephone consultations appear effective, convenient and popular in prespecified subgroups of neurological outpatients. Further work comparing telephone, video and face-to-face consultations across multiple centres is now needed.© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…