“When people get the notification from Consultant Connect, they know it is something they need to look at. They know that someone is trying to contact them about a patient so they need to look at it and respond as it is high priority.” Sylvanna Sandhu
Sylvanna Sandhu works as a Diabetes Foot Nurse Specialist at Warwick Hospital which is part of South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust (SWFT). Photo Advice & Guidance for Diabetic Podiatry is provided in this area via the free Consultant Connect App. It is set up to allow different subteams of hospital clinicians to share photos with each other. This means that patients receive the highest quality of care as their clinical photos can be easily shared with the right team who can then offer a specialist opinion.
Taking and sharing photos on the app allows for rapid patient care. Clinicians in this area know that, when they receive a notification, it is something that they need to address quickly. Sylvanna elaborates on this point and says;
“When people get the notification from Consultant Connect, they know it is something they need to look at. They know that someone is trying to contact them about a patient so they need to look at it and respond as it is high priority.”
“The patient knows that things have been acted on straight away. I can say “I have taken some pictures and now everybody who needs to see this picture can see what is going on so they will be able to make a decision quicker.”
“Some of the patients that we see, if they have got a foot wound, what you would normally do is you would describe it. But, a picture just tells the story so much quicker. If I had a patient who had no foot pulses who I thought needed urgent intervention, an expert could look at that picture, say that it looks ischemic and could advise on what to do.”
Sylvanna has provided the following example of when Photo Advice & Guidance for Diabetic Podiatry on the Consultant Connect App has been useful at SWFT.
“A patient was in the podiatry clinic in the community. They were just having a review but were found to have deteriorated significantly. The podiatrist was able to upload some photographs and do a quick history.”
How Photo Advice & Guidance helped:
The photos were reviewed and “the patient then got transferred urgently to the Vascular team at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (UHCW). That was all done via Consultant Connect. What could have happened is the patient could have been sent in [to a SWFT hospital] for an assessment and then transferred to a UHCW hospital but, by looking at the photographs, we were able to completely bypass that.”
The fact that the patient was seen quickly and efficiently is particularly important as they had an ischemic foot which is a vascular emergency.
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