The Telesafe study: Collecting a research data archive of telephone consultations

Problem

About a quarter of consultations in primary care are conducted by telephone and this seems likely to continue. The Telesafe study aims to collect a dataset of linked recorded telephone consultations with GPs and other primary care clinicians, patient questionnaires and medical records data. This will provide an archive of telephone consultations in primary care for further use in research and training. This builds on and adds to our established research dataset of in person consultations. The ‘One in a Million’ (OiaM) archive contains 300 video or audio recordings of GP consultations, along with linked medical record entries and patient surveys. Data collection for this archive took place in 2014-2015 and in 2017 it was opened as a resource to inform research. More than 71% of eligible patients agreed to have their consultations recorded.

Approach

Practices in the Bristol area who routinely record their telephone consultations were invited to participate. From these, 18 healthcare professionals who agreed for recordings of their telephone consultations to be retained and stored as a research data set were recruited. Patients with a recent telephone consultation were invited to consent for their recorded consultations to be used for research. In addition, they were asked to consent on a clause-by-clause basis for their data to be retained to form a research dataset, consultation recording, transcription of the consultation, extract from the medical records 1 month prior and 3 months post index consultation, survey responses. Participants completed a short survey about their experience of and satisfaction with the index telephone consultation, their preference for mode of consultation and demographic details.

Findings

Data collection is ongoing from 6 practices in the Bristol area. Median list size is 17764 (7155 – 38723 range), with median practice deprivation decile of 4 (range 1 (more deprived) to 9). 18 HCPs have been recruited, 17% non-GPs. 83 patients have been recruited and 96% have given permission for the recording of their telephone consultation to be retained as part of a research dataset. 62% of participants stated that they preferred face to face consultations, of these 73% were happy with their telephone consultation on that occasion. 95% of participants reported that they were satisfied or very satisfied with their telephone consultation. 45% of participants reported that they did not know the healthcare professional that they consulted with, yet 97% reported that they trusted the clinician that they spoke to. (80% ‘yes-definitely’, 20% ‘yes to some extent’).

Consequences

It is feasible to recruit patients to consent for recordings of their telephone consultations (and linked data) to be retained in a research dataset for use by other researchers. Creating a research archive of recordings of telephone consultations and linked data will facilitate and streamline future research.