Remote Clinical Consultations (RCC)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Remote Clinical Consultations in Restorative Dentistry for Primary Care
IRAS ID
279582
Contact name
Nicolas Martin
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
years, 12 months, 0 days
Research summary
The NHS provides specialist consultant services to primary care clinicians for decision-making support and planning patient care. The consultation takes place as an ‘in-person’ event at a secondary care centre where the consultant services are based (Teaching or district hospitals).
This model is used ubiquitously for oral health care and other medical services. There is a drive to deliver this service in a more patient-centred, cost-effective, efficient manner, addressing the NHS plan for a 30% reduction of OP visits (NHS Long Term Plan v1.2, August 2019) and in an environmentally sustainable manner by reducing unnecessary patient travel - 31% of NHS-Dentistry carbon foot print. Remote Clinical Consultations (RCC) have the potential to offer this service by linking both the primary care clinician and the patient (co-located in the dental practice) to a remote specialist consultant, using super-fast internet connectivity.
This enables all the participants (Patient, GDP and consultant) to hold a live 3-way patient-centred discussion about the patient’s care needs. Our research team, has recently completed a comprehensive service evaluation that identifies RCC as being technically feasible with a high level of patient acceptability. We wish to undertake a further PoC feasibility clinical study to test the RCC concept in a dental primary care setting. For this, we have created a strong collaborative alliance with AMRC (Digital Design & Prototyping Group), the Department of Physics and IT Services- STHNHS and a local primary care dental practice consortium (Dental Partners PLC). Following on from this, we will undertake a multi-centre randomised clinical trial in a wider range of settings to determine the cost-effectiveness of this clinical intervention.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - South Yorkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/YH/0112
Date of REC Opinion
18 May 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion