Initial Specialist Telephone Consultation With New Patients in Secondary Care

Imperial College London

Status: Completed

Conditions: Respiratory Diseases

Treatments: Other: No intervention; Other: telephone consultation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT00988000

NHLICX07Q060519

Details and patient eligibility

About

Consultations with patients by hospital consultants are organised today in a manner which is barely dissimilar from that offered 30 or 40 years ago. Whilst some attempts to improve this process, such as Choose and Book, shorter waiting times and patients' receiving a copy of the correspondence sent to their general practitioner (GP) have improved the situation, there has been little radical change and little thought given to the patient experience.

The investigators wish to investigate whether patients' experience of attending respiratory outpatient clinics can be improved by a pre-clinic telephone call with a specialist thereby reducing the number of attendances at the hospital for appointments and investigations and improving overall patient satisfaction.

Full description

This study will investigate whether taking a new patient's history over the telephone permits better selection and arrangement of investigations prior to or synchronous with the first face to face consultation, with the potential to reduce the number of visits the patient has to make to the hospital.

Patients will be offered an initial telephone consultation by post and may opt-in or out of the study. Those having a telephone consultation would have this booked for a specific time and date and the patient would be sent an appropriate information leaflet regarding this. After the telephone consultation patients receive a summary of the consultation and details of any investigations and appointments booked by the research nurse. Patients who did not respond to the initial invitation letter within seven days or who declined to participate would be sent a routine appointment. All patients would asked to complete the MISS-21 questionnaire.

Enrollment: 157 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• All new adult general respiratory referrals from primary care

Exclusion criteria

• Follow-up patients

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

---

157 participants in 3 patient groups

Agree to the alternative study invitation

Other group

Description:

Agree with alternative of telephone consultation (instead of face to face) offered as an initial consultation to new referrals

Treatment:

Other: telephone consultation

Decline the alternative study invitation

Other group

Description:

Decline, no respond to the alternative of telephone consultation

Treatment:

Other: No intervention

Comparator

Other group

Description:

Choose and book

Treatment:

Other: No intervention