Telephone referral significantly reduces waiting days for Internal Medicine consult. This type of referral did not mean an "excessive time and effort consuming" to General Practitioners and was not all that beneficial to complex patients.
In Spain, the average waiting time for a specialist consultation is 58 days. A determinant factor that contributes to this situation is the poor communication between primary care and specialised care, which is mainly due to the waiting days for a consultation, number of avoided/avoidable face-to-face referrals, and waiting days for the resolution of the process. DETELPROG is a referral system in which the family physician requests a scheduled outpatient internal medicine consultation, integrated into the usual consultations agenda of both physicians, the family, and the outpatient clinic physician, in order to have a telephone consultation. A randomized controlled clinical trial has been carried out to assess the effectiveness of DELTELPROG. In a sample of 255 patients, the experimental group was referred via a scheduled telephone call, and those in the control group, by face-to-face hospital consultation area. The results showed statistically significant differences between both groups of 27 days (95% confidence interval (CI): 20–33) regarding specialised consultation, 47 days (95% CI: 17–74) as for the resolution of the process, and 91.7% for avoided face-to-face consultations. The DETELPROG resulted as a low coverage system (53%), which makes it a complementary referral model. It is necessary to make an in-depth analysis of the causes that have led to this technologically low coverage.
The recently developed scheduled mobile-telephone referral model (DETELPROG) has achieved especially important results in reducing waiting days for patients, but it has been decided to explore what barriers and positive aspects were detected by both primary care physicians (PCPs) and hospital attending physicians (HAPs) regarding its use. For this, a qualitative descriptive study was carried out through six semi-structured interviews and two focus groups in a sample of eleven PCPs and five HAPs. Interviews were carried out from September 2019 to February 2020. Data were analysed by creating the initial categories, recording the sessions, transcribing the information, by doing a comprehensive reading of the texts obtained, and analysing the contents. The results show that DETELPROG gives the PCP greater prominence as a patient’s health coordinator by improving their relationship and patient safety; it also improves the relationship between PCP and HAP, avoiding unnecessary face-to-face referrals and providing safety to the PCP when making decisions. The barriers for DETELPROG to be used by PCP were defensive medicine, patients’ skepticism in DETELPROG, healthcare burden, and inability to focus on the patient or interpret a sign, symptom, or diagnostic test. For HAP, the barriers were lack of confidence in the PCP and complexity of the patient. As a conclusion, DETELPROG referral model provides a lot of advantages and does not pose any new barrier to face-to-face referral or other non-face-to-face referral models, so it should be implemented in primary care.
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