Video consultations - for clinicians

Video consultations may be a useful tool to see some of your patients during the pandemic. Use the quick guide above by clicking through the slides to help you and your patient prepare for a video consultation and get the most out of it. Barts Health staff should also see the Barts Health WeShare page with information about setting up at Barts Health in the current crisis.
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About video consultations at Barts Health

Outpatient services can be difficult for many people to attend and do not always meet the needs of patients. This often leads to high rates of non-attendance at appointments and poor patient engagement, resulting in poor health outcomes and greater use of emergency care, plus rising costs.

Research has shown that doing outpatient consultations via video rather than face to face has the potential to address some of the well-recognised problems with current outpatient care. However, implementing video consultations within routine practice in the NHS is challenging. 

We have been exploring the use of video consultations since 2011 for patients who do not need to physically come to the hospital and attend an appointment. Our team has gained significant expertise, resulting in improved attendance rates, patient experience and a reduction in carbon footprint associated with outpatient appointments (see publications below). 

We have developed the resources on these pages to help guide other organisations from our research findings and experience.

The Scaling Up Virtual Consutlations project 2017 - 2020

Our team was selected by the Health Foundation, an independent charity, in October 2017 to be part of a £3.5 million improvement programme. The Scaling Up Improvement programme supports seven projects in the UK to take their proven healthcare innovation and make them work at larger scale to have a positive impact on patient outcomes. 

The project builds on work we have done so far and examines how we can work with a range of local and national partners including local commissioners, NHS England, NHS Digital and Microsoft to scale this up locally and nationally and develop standardised national level policy for the practice. The work has now been evaluated by academic leads at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Science at the University of Oxford.

The final report wil be posted on this site shortly, please contact joanne.morris15@nhs.net  for any further information.

Patient case study

Publications