For people with long term conditions or following surgery, it is often necessary to arrange follow-up appointments to return to hospital or clinic and provide ongoing care. In some cases, patients might need to return for a follow-up appointment sooner than their scheduled session. In others, patients and their clinicians may agree that an automatic follow-up is not required.
Consultant Connect’s Patient Initiated Follow Up Service (PIFU) reduces unnecessary visits to hospital, patient waiting times and releases the clinical teams to see patients in a more timely manner. There is no doubt that this is the simplest, most effective way of delivering follow-up consultations where the clinician does not need to see the patient.
- All calls are recorded and tracked
- Clinicians can access call recordings and PID
- Commissioners and administrators are able to access reports, including the outcome of calls, with all PID stripped out
- For patient photo advice – we currently sit alongside existing NHS email approaches, where patients send their photos in, and these photos are imported into the Consultant Connect system.
- It’s as straightforward as you would expect from Consultant Connect with two pathway options – see diagram below, or click here to download the PDF: