Patients can be treated to a high clinical standard over the phone
Primary Care and phone consultations
ACCORDING to a recent survey GPs in the UK believe 61.2% of patient contacts can be treated to a high clinical standard over the phone.
The data has been gathered by Menlo Park’s November 2021 survey entitled Tech & Primary Care: A Post Pandemic Panacea, which gave 11,000 GPs the opportunity to have their say on current general practice.
In the past few months the national media has been GP bashing and Health Secretary Sajid Javid even threatened to publish league tables on how many patients each practice was seeing face-to-face. At that time GPs were dealing with 58% of patient contacts face to face which Mr Javid did not think was high enough.
Now this latest survey reveals that GPs, on average, believe on 38.8% of appointments need to be face-to-face, in their clinical opinion.
With GP appointments 31% higher compared to pre-pandemic levels, and 70% of GPs believing Covid has made it a more difficult market to recruit clinicians into than prior to Covid, using new ways to treat patients is key to ensuring our services are not overwhelmed.
The ease and convenience of a remote consultation for patients means there is no personal cost in time and disruption of physically attending an appointment and it may also mean the GP can service a higher number of patients and help to cut waiting times for an appointment.
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