What makes a good virtual appointment for people and for clinicians?
In 2022, people who are accessing virtual clinics, their carers, and the NHS clinicians, managers and IT teams who are supporting them from Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) and King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (KCH), came together to improve the virtual appointment experience.
Here you can find materials that could help you if you are designing virtual appointments or looking for ideas.
Here is the charter we designed together:
This is described by people who joined the workshops here:
A virtual consultation should be as good as a good face to face consultation. This is what a good consultation should be like:
This is what the people accessing virtual appointments and the clinicians providing them said were the key priorities for improvement:
‘Video consulting in the NHS’ (Nuffield Dept of Primary Health Sciences, 2021). Guidance and resources for NHS patients and clinicians to support online consultations, including quick guides for staff and patients: https://www.phc.ox.ac.uk/research/resources/video-consulting-in-the-nhs
This programme was commissioned by the Joint Programme for Patient, Care and Public Involvement in COVID Recovery, which is a partnership between Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) including Evelina London Children's Hospital and Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals (RBH) and King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (KCH). It is funded, over two years, by Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity and King’s College Hospital Charity to ensure the involvement of patients, carers and the public in ongoing changes and the development of services necessitated by the COVID pandemic.