Quite a week but let’s put all that to one side and reflect on a fabulous article I came across, which put into perspective what we are trying to do.
Dr John Launer of HEE asks Is there a crisis in clinical consultations? Although he sets the paper in a hospital context, most of his working life has been in primary care and the same principles and questions apply. It’s all about
“the idea that making it easier for clinicians simply to talk with patients may solve many problems that managers might assume need far more complex technological solutions”
Aha. Let’s add to that the assumptions of politicians, along with structural, financial and all kinds of other complicated solutions.
Launer quotes Dr Gordon Caldwell who has outlined ten fundamental conditions to optimise consultations, including:
- The patient should be as prepared as possible
- The clinician should be as prepared as possible
- Ready supply of information into the consultation
Telephone consulting pioneer Dr Steve Laitner contrasts traditional general practice in a tweet, “like having a day of back to back meetings every ten minutes with no idea who you’re meeting and no agendas”
Stressful and far less productive than it might be.
Yet patients are willing to spend their own time writing and preparing when they seek help – we need the system to make it available to GPs.
A recurring theme of patient feedback on askmyGP is “I was able to gather my thoughts before seeing the doctor. I so often forget things when I’m in there.”
Clinicians value enormously what patients write, whether preparing for a phone or face to face consultation. Our task is to develop the handful of questions which provide the most useful information, and I’m delighted to say that researchers are interested in this too.
Our other focus is to make online access so easy and attractive that it becomes the norm. We are over 30% in one practice and it will take a lot of experiment and refinement but I’m looking forward to reaching 50%, which I hope will make a big contribution to clinical quality.
I’ll leave you to look up all ten principles in Launer’s article, but here’s one you will like: “The clinician should be regularly refreshed”. He doesn’t say what with.
Harry Longman
askmyGP & GP Access Ltd
