Transforming Oral Surgery: Integrating Remote Consultations Post-Pandemic (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Some of the problems that we had pre-pandemic were long waiting lists. We had a backlog of patients that essentially needed to be seen face-to-face. When I started in September 2020, some of our longest waiters were from about two and a half years. The focus of my appointment was to look at helping to find a new direction for oral surgery, dental alveolar and combined services and interactions with oral and maxillofacial surgery for patients in NHS Grampian. The patient journey for each of them started with them having a face-to-face assessment, so that meant everyone having to make their way to us to be seen. When you're seeing everyone face-to-face, it's sometimes because you need to see them face-to-face, that's the right way of doing things, and other times it's because we probably hadn't done a bit of the work in terms of triage and vetting to mean that we had everything we needed to give an effective first consultation. So these first consultations were taking more time than was required, and if you're using consultation time to see and deliver care that could be done in an alternative fashion, patients who really need that face-to-face consultation time aren't getting it. Being able to slot in remote consultation clinics using NearMe was a way of being able to deliver clinical activity, help address that backlog, but also provide a quality interaction with the patient and a quality assessment. We slowly

Speaker 2: but surely started to integrate this into our service, and the more I used it, the more I thought, this is actually good, this is actually sometimes better than a face-to-face, but started to see the benefits of it for our patients, and I suppose also from us as clinicians giving us some flexibility in how we see our patients. What became clear was

Speaker 1: this wasn't just a solution to help us in the pandemic, but this was an option that could add real value to how we deliver services and care for our patients long term. So we've essentially redesigned our service across oral maxillofacial surgery, oral surgery, and primary care dentistry with colleagues in the public dental service, with remote consultation using NearMe integral to our continued service delivery plan. This morning

Speaker 2: I was doing a NearMe consultation from my office. All of the other clinical space in my department was completely utilised by other clinicians, so if I hadn't been able to do a NearMe video consultation, I really wouldn't have been able to do any significant clinical work at all, and I managed to see 12 patients this morning. We triaged them all appropriately, we've got them on the appropriate waiting list, some patients don't need to have treatment done, we've just done a whole clinic without using clinical space. What undermines all

Speaker 1: of this is it's about quality interaction for the patient. I always speak to my patients

Speaker 2: at the end of the consultation because often patients feel that it may just be a cost-effective way for the NHS to do it, but actually 99% of them will say this was as good of, if not better, for them on a personal level than coming to the hospital face-to-face. If you're

Speaker 1: able to see a patient remotely, it frees up clinical space and it frees up clinical slots that can be used to treat urgent patients, that can be used to see patients that can only gain value from their healthcare consultation by seeing them face-to-face. NearMe is going

Speaker 2: to be part of healthcare delivery in the future.