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Initial Specialist Telephone Consultation With New Patients in Secondary Care

This study has been completed.
Sponsor:
Collaborator:
The Dunhill Medical Trust
Information provided by:
Imperial College London
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
NCT00988000
First received: September 30, 2009
Last updated: May 26, 2010
Last verified: May 2010
History of Changes
  Purpose

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.


Condition Intervention
Respiratory Diseases
 Other: telephone consultation

Study Type: Interventional
Study Design: Allocation: Non-Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Open Label
Primary Purpose: Health Services Research
Official Title: Telephone Consultations for New Patients Being Referred to a Specialist Respiratory Outpatient Clinic

Further study details as provided by Imperial College London:

Primary Outcome Measures:
  • Patient Satisfaction [ Time Frame: 2010 ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]

Secondary Outcome Measures:
  • Patient costs [ Time Frame: 2010 ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  • Patient views about outpatient experience [ Time Frame: 2010 ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]
  • Reduction in number of required hospital attendances [ Time Frame: 2010 ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]

Estimated Enrollment: 100
Study Start Date: June 2009
Study Completion Date: April 2010
Primary Completion Date: April 2010 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)
Arms Assigned Interventions
Alternative appointment system
Alternative of telephone consultation (instead of face to face) offered as an initial consultation to new referrals
 Other: telephone consultation
alternative to face to face consultation for new referrals

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.

  Eligibility

Ages Eligible for Study:   18 Years and older
Genders Eligible for Study:   Both
Accepts Healthy Volunteers:   No
Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

  • All new adult general respiratory referrals from primary care

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Follow-up patients
  Contacts and Locations
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00988000

Locations
United Kingdom
Imperial College at Charing Cross campus
London, United Kingdom, W6 8RF
Sponsors and Collaborators
Imperial College London
The Dunhill Medical Trust
Investigators
Principal Investigator: Professor MR Partridge, MD FRCP Imperial College London
  More Information

No publications provided

Responsible Party: Imperial College
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00988000     History of Changes
Other Study ID Numbers: NHLICX07Q060519
Study First Received: September 30, 2009
Last Updated: May 26, 2010
Health Authority: United Kingdom: Research Ethics Committee

Keywords provided by Imperial College London:
outpatients

Additional relevant MeSH terms:
Respiration Disorders
Respiratory Tract Diseases

ClinicalTrials.gov processed this record on May 23, 2013