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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Evaluation of telephone first approach to demand management in English general practice
— observational study | | Author(s) | Jennifer Newbould, Gary Abel, Sarah Ball |
| Journal title | BMJ 2017;358:j4197, 27 September 2017 |
| Pages | 9 pp |
| Source | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j4197 |
| Keywords | General practice ; Telephone ; Consultation ; General practitioners ; Consumer demand ; Evaluation ; England. |
| Annotation | This article evaluates a "telephone first" approach, in which all patients wanting to see a general practitioner (GP) are asked to speak to a GP on the phone before being given an appointment for a face-to-face consultation. 147 general practices adopting the telephone first approach (provided by two commercial companies) were compared with a 10% random sample of other practices in England. After the introduction of the telephone first approach, face-to-face consultations decreased considerably. An average practice experienced a 12-fold increase in telephone consultations. The average duration of both telephone and face-to-face consultations decreased, but there was an overall increase of 8% in the mean time spent consulting by GPs, albeit with large uncertainty on this estimate. These average workload figures mask wide variation between practices, with some practices experiencing a substantial reduction in workload and others a large increase. Compared with other English practices in the national GP Patient Survey, in practices using the telephone first approach there was a large (20.0 percentage points) improvement in length of time to be seen. In contrast, other scores on the GP Patient Survey were slightly more negative. Introduction of the telephone first approach was followed by a small (2.0%) increase in hospital admissions, no initial change in emergency department attendance, but a small (2% per year) decrease in the subsequent rate of rise of emergency department attendance (1% to 3%). There was a small net increase in secondary care costs. The study concludes that the telephone first approach shows that many problems in general practice can be dealt with over the phone. The approach does not suit all patients or practices and is not a panacea for meeting demand. There was no evidence to support claims that the approach would, on average, save costs or reduce use of secondary care. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-171031003 A |
| Classmark | L5: UJ: LK6: QT6: WYD: 4C: 82 * |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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