BACKGROUND:
Clinical hotlines or helplines are an established adjunct to current outpatient practice in rheumatology departments worldwide. The main aim of a hotline is to provide direct access to clinicians who are able to give specific advice in response to a patient’s or heath professional’s concerns. They improve access to services, reduce need for face-to-face appointments, have high levels of patient satisfaction, and are likely to lead to reductions in health-care costs. One of the issues rheumatology patients have had at the Royal Prince Alfred hospital is difficulty accessing health advice between clinical appointments. As a solution to this problem, a clinical hotline has been developed with a view to providing access to patient and carers for urgent clinical matters. The aims of this study were to audit the first two months of the hotline being active by assessing both patient and clinician satisfaction.
METHODS:
The service will be operational from 0900-1600 Mondays to Fridays. The phone will be carried by a rheumatology advanced trainee. Patients will be given a wallet sized information card with the phone number to call and for what reasons they should call the hotline. A logbook of phone calls received will be used to audit the service and include the duration of the phone call, total time taken to manage the call, patient age and gender, underlying diagnosis, nature of the call, outcome of the call, and whether it was an appropriate use of the hotline. Patients using the hotline in the first 2-months will also be surveyed with regards to their experience in using it. A cost analysis will be performed by comparing the cost of running the hotline, compared to the number of GP and ED visits prevented according to the results of the follow-up survey.
RESULTS:
To come
CONCLUSION:
To come