About a third of consultation appointments in primary care are now conducted by telephone. An important aspect of any GP consultation, whatever the mode, is ‘safety-netting advice’ – providing patients with clear advice about what to look out for and when to seek further medical help if their condition changes, fails to improve or if a patient has further concerns about their health. It is important to understand how, and how often, GPs and other primary care clinicians provide this type of advice in telephone consultations.

In this study we would like to collect recordings of telephone consultations in general practice and initially use these to look at how clinicians provide ‘safety netting advice’ via the telephone. When the Telesafe study is complete, we would like to add the recordings to our research archive, the ‘One in a Million: Primary care consultations archive’. This already contains video recordings of 300 face-to-face consultations with GPs with permission from participants to re-use this data (subject to new ethical approval for each study). You can find out more about the archive and original study by clicking this link.