5 minutes with a GP in Somerset
Dr Ian Craig is General Practitioner at Glastonbury Surgery in NHS Somerset CCG.
The Consultant Connect Telephone Advice & Guidance service was made available to his practice in November 2016. Dr Craig talks to us about what he thinks of the service and how using the Consultant Connect App has improved patient care.
1. How does the Consultant Connect App help you in your day-to-day job?
- It allows me to make clinically urgent decisions using the advice from a consultant.
2. How did you get specialist advice, before using Telephone Advice & Guidance?
- Using written Advice & Guidance letters or phoning the registrar on call.
3. Why should your GP colleagues, who haven’t used the Consultant Connect service, use it?
- Using the Consultant Connect App makes it easy to select the specialty you need, and it also tells you which local hospital teams are available.
- Even if your local consultant team is not available, I have found the out-of-area NHS consultants on the National Consultant Network (NCN) to be very helpful and happy to offer advice.
4. Can you share a recent example of how the Telephone Advice & Guidance service helped you and a patient?
- I saw a patient with symptoms from enlarged saliva glands. The patient was already known to the local ENT team, but their symptoms had worsened. I wanted to know how to manage them in the short term and I was able to speak to an ENT consultant for advice. This made me more confident with my management plan and reassured the patient that we had sought specialist advice. The patient appreciated having a specialist give us advice.
