Asthma telephone reviews shown to be effective

A study has found that telephone reviews of patients with asthma are just as effective as face-to-face consultations and can increase patient confidence, prompting calls for telephone reviews to be approved for Quality and Outcomes Framework (QoF) claims.

Earlier this year national arbitrators ruled that there was insufficient evidence for widespread use of telephone reviews in general practice for asthma patients and upheld a decision by two primary care trusts to disallow QoF payments based on telephone reviews.

Now Dr Hilary Pinnock, a GP in Whitstable, Kent, and clinical research fellow at Edinburgh University, has presented evidence to the European Respiratory Society’s annual congress that telephone reviews can be effective.

A total of 1,213 patients with asthma at Dr Pinnock’s practice were divided into two groups with one group provided only with face-to-face reviews and a second group offered the option of a telephone review.

Questionnaires sent out a year later found that telephone assessment was just as effective in terms of asthma control and quality of life, but also that the patients with the telephone monitoring option felt better able to manage variations in their condition and had more confidence in the care provided.

Dr Pinnock told EHI Primary Care: “We saw 12% more people by using telephone reviews and the patients who had the telephone reviews also felt more empowered to manage their conditions.”

Dr Pinnock said that she hoped the results from her study would be taken into account by the QoF review team.

She added: “The QoF group previously said that there was insufficient evidence to recommend widespread use but we now have quite good evidence that patients benefited from the fact that they were offered a telephone review.”

Dr Pinnock said that the results had been so conclusive in her own practice that the telephone option had been extended to be offered to all patients.