Patient satisfaction with telephone consultations at a community mental health service: a descriptive survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Aims Research has demonstrated that there are several models of teleconsultation, and that these can be effective and acceptable to patients. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sudden shift to phone consultations in community mental health services. This study assessed the impact of this change from the patient perspective and thus determined how this mode of delivery can be optimised going forwards. Method Data were collected using a semi-structured, self-reporting patient satisfaction questionnaire with 17 items, which was sent to 200 patients who had received both an in-person and telephone consultation from a community mental health team in Wales. The themes covered in the questionnaire were communication, interpersonal manner, technical quality, convenience and general satisfaction. A total of 114 respondents rated their agreement with the items on a 5-point Likert scale, and free-text boxes were provided for suggestions and comments. Quantitative data were summarised using descriptive statistics and free-text comments were analysed thematically. Results The majority of the patients gave positive responses, with 70–94% either agreeing or strongly agreeing with the positive statements regarding the communication, interpersonal manner, technical quality and length of consultation that they experienced. Overall, 74% agreed or strongly agreed that they were generally satisfied. However, only 52% believed that telephone consultations were more convenient than in-person hospital appointments, and nearly one-quarter (24%) did not want to continue with telephone consultations in the future. Suggested improvements included the use of video consultations, provision of extra time for consultations and a general increase in the services available. Conclusions Telephone consultations were generally perceived as acceptable, useful and effective, helping patients to access ongoing mental health care. This suggests that telephone consultations could be an effective method of care delivery in the future. However, there is a need for further research and development in the remote delivery of mental health services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".