Continuity and change - SM
Jan 31, 2024, 11:49 AM
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I think in our practice, because our practice worked in a minority way, which is our practice always for about eight years or so, has always been what we call a telephone first practice, so we would always phone – every patient requesting a consultation would be phoned first, and we’d discuss with them on the phone whether they needed to come in, or whether there’s some other service that they need, and then arrange for them to come in. When the pandemic came, we didn’t need to change our system… All we needed to do really, was to increase the sort of PPE, perhaps be a little stricter over who needed to come in… Actually we had, you know, unfilled appointments sometimes, which is, you know, unheard of in GP land, um, and, you know, we actually had time to meet, have training sessions, do things that we might like to do normally – most of all have time for patients and uh, we actually, you know you could happily spend half an hour with a patient if they needed it during that time. So that was really unusual – eerily quiet time during the pandemic… The only things that were added – we did two things that were different: one, there was the option of video, um, consultations, very easily operated, and the second thing the ease of doing remote consulting… We then actually got all these laptops from NHS England, um, and they were all set up to do remote consulting, with the remote telephony as well… That was a bit of a game-changer which meant that if a colleague needed to self-isolate, due to, for contact reasons, they actually could carry on working at home. Um, and actually from a patient experience point of view, they wouldn’t have been able to tell that we weren’t in the practice, because the telephony would just look like we were phoning from the practice.