Home Page

UHP's vision is to provide outstanding integrated care with a key strategic objective of being able to provide services in a sustainable way. Helping us work towards this objective is one of our top 3 improvement challenges, which is to reduce outpatient routine follow-up appointments physically seen in a hospital setting by 35% by 2024. This is above the national goal of 25% which we are already consistently exceeding! 

We’re achieving this through various alternatives for face to face outpatient appointments including increasing the amount of these being performed by offering non-face to face ‘virtual clinics’ in which outpatient consultations are delivered over telephone or an Attend anywhere video call.  

Virtual clinic utilisation was implemented quickly in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic assisting in minimising the effect healthcare appointments had on the potential spread of the virus. As we emerge into the post pandemic landscape there are still numerous benefits for patients to having these virtual clinics over the traditional face to face offering, including time and money saved due to the lack of need to travel or park; no waiting around for the appointment; less time off from work; relatives/other people can more easily attend with the patient that may have proved difficult previously. 

The impact of non-face to face clinics is quite substantial; with close to 270,000 being performed between April 2021 and September 2022, we have helped save a minimum 80,000 hours of patient time; 125,000 parking spaces being saved; enough miles of patient travel to circle the earth 390 times (nearly 10,000,000 miles!) which has prevented 2,000 tonnes of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere. 

Due to its convenience, this method of performing consultations has been really well received by patients with clinicians also being more than happy to provide care in this way. 

Minor hurdles were encountered and resolved early in the rolling out of this approach including; dedicated infrastructure in the form of ‘pods’ are now available to clinicians to not impact the space available for face to face appointments; a system to ensure adequate notes have been collected and are available to clinicians; only appointments that don’t require physical examination or the picking up of body language are booked in; along with resources to support clinicians to assist in delivering these new clinics. 

Focusing on transforming common practice by; switching to delivering non-face to face appointments via use of telephone, video call and virtual clinics; patient initiated follow ups; eliminating unnecessary appointments; and different ways of working across the board is helping us meet our goals of switching to more sustainable practises without compromising the level of care we provide.