‘Phone first’ approach to deal with patients

GPS could help up to half of their patients with their problems over the phone, a new study has found.

Family doctors who introduce a “telephone first” approach could see a “considerable” reduction in the number of face-to-face consultations, the research found.

After introducing such a method – where patients are required to speak to a family doctor on the phone before being given a faceto-face consultation – GP services tend to see large increases in phone consultations and decreases in face-to-face appointments.

But the authors stressed that adopting this approach was “no panacea” for meeting patient demand because the method is associated with overall increase in GP workload.

The study, led by the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research, examined 147 GP practices in England using this method and compared them with a sample of control practices.

Their study, published in The British Medical Journal (BMJ), found that after adopting the approach, face-to-face consultations decreased “considerably”.

But while some GP practices reported a substantial reduction in workload, others reported a large increase.

“Our study shows that adoption of the telephone first approach in general practice had a major effect on patterns of consultation, with large increases in phone consultations and decreases in face-to-face consultations,” the authors wrote.