Northern Care Alliance - Remote Appointments Report
In early 2021 Healthwatch Oldham was commissioned by the Northern Care Alliance to look at how we could work in partnership to gather people's feedback on remote appointments with the intention to produce a report, with recommendations aiming to shape a patient guide around accessing and attending remote appointments (Remote being either by telephone or video call) and to provide valuable insight to NCA on how services can improve the patient experience as we move forward.
Healthwatch Oldham, the Northern Care Alliance and AQUA (Advancing Quality Alliance) co-produced a survey to help identify how people have found the experience of a remote appointment, including what has gone well and any areas of improvement that may need to be considered. The survey also wanted to explore the reasons why some patients may not have engaged with virtual appointments at all. The report also recognises where the needs of patients were met during remote appointments, and what type of remote appointments met people’s health needs.
The survey was shared in the public domain and four focus groups were facilitated to look at specific feedback from seldom-heard communities, including;
- People from BAME Communities
- People with a Learning Disability
- Open focus group
- People living with cancer
A total of 211 surveys were completed.
Key Findings
Communication: Where patients were contacted on time this worked well, however where there were issues and delays this was caused by personal and professional responsibilities, which ultimately impacted the quality of the appointment and there the overall remote appointment experience. Our findings show the need of vulnerable people for example those with learning disabilities, were not always considered or facilitated appropriately.
Accessibility: Our responses show that people had an adequate chance and time to access information and therefore prepare for their appointment, this worked well. However, where this was not the case, this caused further complications and affected the quality of the remote appointment. Through this area, issues around lack of physical examination, the lack of privacy potentially if they are in a work setting, and the difficulty for people with hearing difficulty including those who identify as having a learning disability.
Patient Experience: Amongst those who did have concerns about their patient experience, this focused mainly on two areas. Firstly, patients fed back to us that the communication within the system internally whilst setting up the appointment was somewhat disjointed. Examples given included, the wrong appointment details being on appointment letters. This meant patients were preparing or turning up for appointments that were not necessarily taking place in the format stipulated on appointment letters. Secondly, people with learning disabilities shared with us difficulties they faced around remote appointments when they did not have the support of their carer or had the required technology to properly facilitate a remote appointment, or did not have good acoustics to help with the quality of the remote appointment.
The patient guide has now been published and is available on the Northern Care Alliance website (need to give link), this has been produced with our findings and recommendations taken into consideration. This goes hand in hand with a separate clinician's guide that has been produced, again this has been done with our findings and recommendations taken into consideration.
