Care Opinion

Text size

Theme

Language

Videos in BSL or ISL
Help with language translation
Help with reading or listening

eConsult is broken

Story from nhs.uk

"eConsult is broken"

About: Green Meadows Surgery

Patients can no longer make appointments over the phone and we are directed to their eConsult service that has extremely limited illness options to choose from - you cannot progress your application on some screens without picking a symptom that is totally unrelated to your illness.

If you manage to get through to the end of your eConsultation and submit your form, you are then texted by the surgery advising you that your phone appointment with the Doctor is in 2 weeks time. What good is that to anyone?

I now just call 111 instead (I inform them of my symptoms with the same information provided on the eConsult form) and place a heavier burden on the wider NHS, I am usually seen on the same or next day and usually by a GP at Green Meadows surgery! Why does the Surgery even exist?

If this was a one off I could understand… but this has now happened to me and other family members (in the same household) on numerous occasions now. Don’t waste your time filling n a nonsensical form that pro actively works against you - simply call 111 it’s quicker, easier and you get seen by the surgery on the same day most times.

In the interests of fairness I do have to say that the GPs, Surgery staff are all fantastic people! They too (in their own words) are frustrated and feel let down by an unworkable, anti-patient, online triaging system.

Please please please listen to your patients and either go back to letting us call for appointments or put in a system that actually works with your patients, is user friendly, accessible to all (especially the older generation) and that actually delivers the timely and credible service that your patients deserve.

Yes, I’m anonymous as you don’t need to know who I am to fix a broken system.

More about:
nhs.uk logo
Do you have a similar story to tell? Tell your story & make a difference ››

Responses

Response from Green Meadows Surgery 2 years ago
Green Meadows Surgery

Submitted on 12/12/2022 at 15:30
Published on nhs.uk on 13/12/2022 at 10:23

Dear Patient,

We are sorry that you have had reason to post these comments. As you are anonymous, we cannot go into specific detail regarding your experience, but we can give some general information regarding the change to e-consult.

As a practice that aims to provide a safe and friendly high-quality service by working together with patients and looking after our staff, we made the decision to change our appointment booking system and introduce e-Consult.

Use of an online service, such as e-consult, is part of the GP contract and compulsory digital services in General Practice are part of the government’s Digital First Primary Care agenda for the NHS so there is no escaping an increased involvement in IT when accessing GP surgery services.

The overall aim of eConsult was to encourage all patients to use the service in a responsible manner with the hope that it would reduce the level of phone calls coming into the surgery, thus enabling our reception staff to help other patients in need. It was hoped that patients would complete the right eConsult for their health condition or admin request and that this would be directed to the correct team and lead to increased efficiency and time saving.

We appreciate that some of our older patients may have difficulties with an IT based service, and we presumed that demand on the phones would be sufficiently reduced to free up our reception team to help the vulnerable and the elderly or others who were struggling with IT. Please be assured that we have a process in place whereby our reception team will ensure that any elderly patients, patients with learning difficulties or those with no online access are dealt with and contacted by the most appropriate service.

Unfortunately, our phones have remained as busy as ever as anyone attempting to call the practice will have discovered. This is due to a core of patients consistently not engaging with the service or indicating that they would struggle using it. This is by no means confined to our older patients, patients of all groups have chosen not to engage with the service and have continued to ring instead which has resulted in our phone lines being as busy as ever.

As part of our Multidisciplinary clinical team, we now have a practice-based Paramedic Practitioner, who triages all incoming e-consults to ensure that the most unwell patients are assisted in a timely manner and working closely with the Duty Doctor to provide on the day assessment for acute problems such as UTI’s, sore throats, earache, cough, diarrhoea etc.

We encourage patients not to enter misleading or incorrect information on eConsults to ensure their eConsult can be submitted through to us. For example, saying headache instead of chest pain and then having to answer irrelevant headache questions because chest pain would have resulted in the patient being advised to call 999 for a suspected heart attack or calling 111 if the clinical guidance is not to do so.

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful
Opinions
Next Response j
Previous Response k