Helping Secondary Care clinicians make the most of the Consultant Connect service

Providing Advice & Guidance to Primary Care clinicians increases hospital efficiency as you can advise on the most appropriate destination or outcome for the patient. This prevents unnecessary trips to hospital for patients and ensures you only see the patients you need to see.

Timely availability of specialist Advice & Guidance often enables Primary Care clinicians to improve and expedite the care of their patients. It is also a great opportunity for education and knowledge sharing between clinicians – if a patient presents to primary care with a similar condition in future, the clinician may feel confident in managing the patient without the need to seek specialist Advice & Guidance.

Consultant Connect is designed so that calls are routed through to a rota of available specialists. If you can’t answer, the call will automatically jump to the next available specialist.

Consultant Connect provides valuable data regarding call volumes, length of calls and outcomes, as well as call recordings for medico-legal purposes. This data can be used to inform decisions within your team and also provides a valuable training tool. Consultant Connect data also fully integrates with NHSE reporting for Advice & Guidance and system EROC.

If you already provide Telephone Advice & Guidance to Primary Care via local ‘on-call’ or ‘hot-week’ consultant lines, we can integrate your existing telephone line onto the system, giving you the ability to record the content of calls and benefit from access to rich data on call volumes and sources.

Similarly, if you already respond to written requests for Advice & Guidance, we can add the group to our system. We offer IG-secure Messaging Advice & Guidance. For clinicians seeking advice, they simply write a message and add attachments. Email and app notifications let hospital teams know when a message is received, and specialists can respond on the app or their desktop. All of this activity is tracked – numbers of cases per specialty, time to response, patient outcomes and more.

The service gives clinicans the ability to contribute significantly to patient care whilst working remotely or at home.

Calls are recorded for medico-legal purposes, and the call recordings are also being used to deliver appropriate training.

This prevents unnecessary trips to hospital for patients and ensures you only see the patients you need to see.

The service gives clinicans the ability to contribute significantly to patient care whilst working remotely or at home.

Increases opportunity for learning from senior and specialist consultants.

Allowing for them to be effectively deployed over a range of healthcare settings – from neonatology to routine clinics, ensuring that you can maximise the effectiveness of your workforce.