Initial Specialist Telephone Consultation With New Patients in Secondary Care

Not Applicable

Completed

• Conditions: Respiratory Diseases
• Interventions: Other: No intervention; Other: telephone consultation

• Registration Number: NCT00988000
• Lead Sponsor: Imperial College London

Brief 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.

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2009-06
• Study First Submitted: 2009-09-30
• Study First Submitted QC: 2009-09-30
• Study First Posted: 2009-10-01
• Primary Completion: 2010-04
• Study Completion: 2010-04
• Results First Submitted: 2019-03-21
• Status Verified: 2019-10
• Results First Submitted QC: 2019-10-23
• Last Update Submitted: 2019-10-23
• Results First Posted: 2019-10-25
• Last Update Posted: 2019-10-25

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: COMPLETED
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 157

Inclusion Criteria

• All new adult general respiratory referrals from primary care

Exclusion Criteria

• Follow-up patients

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Decline the alternative study invitation	No intervention	Decline, no respond to the alternative of telephone consultation
Comparator	No intervention	Choose and book
Agree to the alternative study invitation	telephone consultation	Agree with alternative of telephone consultation (instead of face to face) offered as an initial consultation to new referrals

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Patient Satisfaction of the Alternative Consultation	First clinic appointment (Month 0) and Follow-up appointment (6 months	Patient Satisfaction assessed by MISS scale, Medical interview satisfaction score. The score 0-7, 0 means dissatisfaction, higher scores indicate higher satisfaction.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Number of Required Investigations	0-6 months	reduction in number of required investigations

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Imperial College at Charing Cross campus; 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom