ArticleBMC health services research2012
Factors which influence the length of an out-of-hours telephone consultation in primary care: a retrospective database study.
Article in BMC health services research, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Does the duration of ambulatory consultations affect the quality of healthcare? A systematic review.BMJ open quality · 2023Pooled it
- The effect of nurses' preparedness and nurse practitioner status on triage call management in primary care: A secondary analysis of cross-sectional data from the ESTEEM trial.International journal of nursing studies · 2016Trial
- Telephone triage systems in UK general practice: analysis of consultation duration during the index day in a pragmatic randomised controlled trial.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2016Trial
- Article
- Evaluation of the performance of telephone triage service.Scandinavian journal of trauma, resuscitation and emergency medicine · 2025Article
- Survey protocol: implementing Workload Indicators of Staffing Need in Iranian primary healthcare services.Primary health care research & development · 2025Article
- Phone triage nurses' assessment of respiratory tract infections - the tightrope walk between gatekeeping and service providing. A qualitative study.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2021Article
- Article
- Article
- Article
- Factors affecting medical file documentation during telephone triage at an emergency call centre: a cross-sectional study of out-of-hours home visits by general practitioners in France.BMC health services research · 2019Article
- Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundGiven the increasing use of telephone consultation it is important to determine the factors which influence the length of a telephone consultation.
methodAnalysis of 128717 telephone consultations during January to December 2011 to a National Health Service (NHS) out-of-hours primary care service provider in Shropshire and Telford and Powys, England, involving 102 General Practitioners (GPs) and 36 Nurse Practitioners (NPs). Telephone consultation conclude with one of three outcomes - advice only, the patient is invited to a face-to-face consultation with a GP or NP at a nearby health centre (known as a base visit) or the patient is visited at home by a GP or NP (known as home visit). Call length was analysed by these outcomes.
resultsThe overall mean call length was 7.78 minutes (standard deviation (SD) 4.77). Calls for advice only were longest (mean 8.11 minutes, SD 5.17), followed by calls which concluded with a base visit (mean 7.36 minutes, SD 4.08) or a home visit (mean 7.16 minutes, SD 4.53). Two primary factors influenced call length. Calls by GPs were shorter (mean 7.15 minutes, SD 4.41) than those by NPs (mean 8.74 minutes, SD 5.31) and calls designated as a mental health call were longer (mean 11.16 minutes, SD 4.75) than all other calls (mean 7.73 minutes, SD 7.7).
conclusionsTelephone consultation length in the out-of-hours setting is influenced primarily by whether the clinician is a GP or a NP and whether the call is designated as a mental health call or not. These findings suggest that appropriate attempts to reduce the length of the telephone consultations should focus on these two areas, although the longer consultation length associated with NPs is offset to some extent by their lower employment costs compared to GPs. Nonetheless the extent to which the length of a telephone consultation impacts on subsequent use of the health service and correlates with quality and safety remains unclear.
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