NCT00988000

Initial Specialist Telephone Consultation With New Patients in Secondary Care

Telephone Consultations for New Patients Being Referred to a Specialist Respiratory Outpatient Clinic

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 157 (actual)
• Sponsor: Imperial College London · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

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.

Detailed 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.

Conditions

• Respiratory Diseases

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	telephone consultation	alternative to face to face consultation for new referrals
OTHER	No intervention	no alternative to face to face consultation

Timeline

• Start date: 2009-06-01
• Primary completion: 2010-04-01
• Completion: 2010-04-01
• First posted: 2009-10-01
• Last updated: 2019-10-25
• Results posted: 2019-10-25

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United Kingdom