A national doctors’ leader based in Tayside said the telephone is “under-used” in surgeries and clinics.
Dr Andrew Buist said the low tech option could be better exploited rather than introducing more complex technology for consultations.
The Blairgowrie GP, who is deputy chairman of the British Medical Association’s Scottish GP committee, was responding to plans being considered by government ministers in England, where patients may be asked to submit a description of their symptoms to their doctor by email and get an electronic reply later the same day.
If the doctor decided the symptoms required a face-to-face consultation, they would then either ask the patient to visit the surgery or arrange a home visit.
Dr Buist said email does have a place, but warned there were risks. One of his concerns was GPs being “flooded” with email inquiries and the potential for serious symptoms to get buried.
He said if Scottish GPs went down the road being advocated in England he had concerns about the capacity for surgeries to cope.
“Obviously one of our concerns would be if we opened up the option of email consultation, what would happen if you were flooded with inquiries and not able to cope with them or mixed in with 50 queries in a morning there were one or two that were important but you didn’t get time to answer them all because you were seeing patients or answering the telephone,” Dr Buist said.ExploitHe added, “Technology is not always cheap and while it might look very good at a glossy brochure launch the reality is something different.”
He said the Scottish Government was “quite enthusiastic” about what is known as telehealth, which aims to exploit modern technology.
“These things do have their place but need to be properly evaluated,” Dr Buist said. “One thing that is underused is the telephone. People are so keen to get video links rather than just picking up the phone and speaking to a patient.
“Most GP practices I know offer telephone consultations. They are very useful if someone is at work and wants to speak to a doctor or if they have had a test done and want the results but don’t want to come into the surgery. They are a good use of the patients’ time and a good use of the GPs’ time.”
He said there was a need to extend phone consultation, particularly in relation to hospital care.
Dr Buist said a patient of his in her 30s had a breast biopsy recently. It took about 10 days for the samples to be tested and the results to be ready, but she had to wait five weeks to return to hospital for her results which were okay.