Telephone-based consultation in an acute eye clinic service: A patient satisfaction survey.

Objectives: The coronavirus pandemic has forced healthcare staff across all medical specialties to adapt new and different ways of working. A new approach has been set up in the Acute Referral Clinic (ARC) at Musgrove Park Hospital and a survey has been conducted to measure the impact of the new method on patient and healthcare professionals' satisfaction with the new service.

Methods: A telephone-based consultation was introduced in ARC at Musgrove Park Hospital in March 2020 and patients were instructed to fill out a questionnaire containing eight items using a Likert Scale 1 ('very poor/disagree') to 4 ('very good/strongly agree') plus two boxes for open positive and negative comments respectively. Likewise a questionnaire was designed in order to assess the healthcare professionals' satisfaction using the new approach. Data collection took place over a two month period between the end of March 2020 and end of May 2020. The data underwent quality control and was analysed using descriptive statistics.

Results: Patient responses illustrated high satisfaction scores with an overall rating of very good (89.4%). The healthcare professionals' rating of the service was good (28.6% - 'very good/strongly agree', 57.1% - 'good/agree'). The safety rating of the new approach was overall rated 'very good' with 90.4% and 71.4% of patients and healthcare professionals respectively.

Conclusions: The telephone consultations introduced in the wake of COVID-19 are well accepted by both patients and doctors. There are some limitations of the approach, foremost being consultation time and clinic space but these do not outweigh the general benefit of this format amidst a pandemic setting.