Telephone clinics in inflammatory bowel disease: an extended role for the nurse specialist

Chronic management of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is, appropriately, in the community supported by expert input from secondary care. Increasingly, in the UK, the role of the specialist nurse is central to provision of such services to patients with chronic illnesses. So it is appropriate that a telemedicine service has been developed and reported on, from Scotland, in this issue of Frontline Gastroenterology. In a cycle of health care funding in which there is great pressure on general practitioners, this becomes especially acute, and it is maybe not surprising that one-third of the utilisation of the service was for non-IBD related matters. Average call times were 20 minutes, reflecting the importance of giving sufficient time to patients and emphasising the value of such telephone services to support best …