Remote care
Remote consultations played a significant role in GPs providing care throughout the pandemic as practices responded to government guidance. Today, practices continue to work in a hybrid fashion, mixing remote and face-to-face consultations. This offers many benefits including flexibility for patients, but practices will be continuing to consider how to balance emerging ways of working with the importance of relational care, while ensuring inequalities are not exacerbated. Therefore, this is an area the College is continuing to monitor and work on.
Remote consultations report – May 2021
In May 2021, the RCGP produced a report called 'The future of remote consultations and patient 'triage'', which explores ways of working in general practice in a post-pandemic scenario and highlights that the mode of consultation should be determined through shared decision-making between a patient and practice staff.
The report calls on the government to:
- Invest £1 billion in improving the digital infrastructure for general practice. This will help GPs to provide better remote care and make it more accessible for everyone.
- Review and improve digital patient triage platforms and processes, and produce guidance for patients and staff to support effective implementation.
- Ensure GPs and wider teams have access to the tools, training, guidance and support in routinely using digital tools in their practice.
- Implement targeted strategies to support equal patient access to care, ensuring that all patients can access care through traditional routes when they need to, as well as to support improving digital literacy and digital access where appropriate.
- Commission research into models of triage and remote consultations to evaluate the effectiveness and efficacy of existing methods. This should review the impact on general practice workload and the cost-benefits of implementation.
The future role of remote consultations and patient 'triage' (PDF file, 333 KB)
Resources
The College also offers eLearning and useful material on remote consultations and triaging.
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