TELESAFE
Research type
Research Study
Full title
One in a Million TELESAFE: Understanding how clinicians in general practice make safe follow-up plans in telephone appointments
IRAS ID
315519
Contact name
Chris Salisbury
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Bristol
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 8 months, 1 days
Research summary
An important aspect of any healthcare consultation, whatever the mode, is ‘safety-netting’ – providing patients with clear advice about what to look out for and when to seek further medical help if their condition changes or does not improve. It is arguable that providing safety-netting advice is particularly important in telephone consultations where the healthcare professional is unable to see the patient. It is therefore important for patient safety to understand how, and how often healthcare professionals provide this safety netting advice in telephone consultations, which have become more common since the covid-19 pandemic.\n\nWhat is the aim of the project?\nTo understand how GPs and other healthcare professionals in primary care provide safety netting advice in telephone consultations and to learn how patients respond to this. In addition to collect a dataset of recordings of telephone consultations in primary care to develop an archive for future use by researchers.\n\nWhat are we doing?\nMany GP practices routinely record all telephone communications to and from their practice, including consultations. A research team at the University of Bristol is planning to invite healthcare professionals from practices and their patients who have had a recent telephone consultation to give consent for a copy of their recorded consultation to be transferred to the research team. There, it will be anonymised and after it has been used for this piece of research it will be deposited in a research archive so that it can be made accessible to other researchers in the future for other research questions and for the teaching and training of health professionals. \n\nWe will analyse these consultations to understand how and in what circumstances GPs provided safety netting advice, whether this has an impact on subsequent consultations and use these findings to make recommendations for safer practice.\n
REC name
South West - Central Bristol Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/SW/0139
Date of REC Opinion
9 Dec 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion