Virtual consultation

Welcome to Attend Anywhere, Moorfields Eye Hospital's video consultation service.

Video consultations are convenient, safe, and easy to use. They enable you to have your appointment via a secure video environment from the comfort of your own home.

Your clinical team will have assessed your case before inviting you to attend a video consultation and should you need to be assessed or treated in person you will be sent a follow-up appointment to attend one of our clinics.

In your appointment letter, you will find a link to a short video guide explaining how to log on to the service and what devices and internet access you will need. Video calls are free for patients, though you will need to have internet access.

When you have logged onto the service for your appointment, you will be greeted by one of our virtual receptionists. The receptionist will ask you to confirm your name, date of birth, first line of address and postcode, in order to verify they are speaking to the correct patient. You will also be asked to confirm your telephone number, email address and GP details.

If any of these details have changed, the receptionist will update these for you. Your personal details are not stored in the system and your call is not recorded.

You will then be transferred to the correct virtual clinic waiting area and the receptionist will exit the call. The clinician will join the call as soon as they become available and you will have your consultation. Please be reassured that if you experience any technical difficulties during the call, we will attempt to call you on the contact number you have provided us with.

Patients who've used the service have found it to be simple to use, convenient and have found their appointments to be a positive experience.

We can often reassure, believe it or not, most of the complaints that patients come by, you know lumps or bumps around the eyes, can be resolved just on a video consultation and then we can put them on the right pathway, to the right clinic for further management if needed.

Some patients do sometimes say they've just had an operation and they have really severe pain, the vision has changed, those kind of red flag symptoms get flagged up and we bring them straight to A&E or we ask them to attend the local A&E department depending where they're calling from.

For emergency eye care and we liaise with that department accordingly and so the feedback I often get from a patients is ‘thank you’ and that's a great experience because I don't know how many patients who go to A&E thank the doctor. But, if I save someone an unnecessary journey, or if I can just say to the patient ‘oh you haven't been seen for X number of months, but now your vision's declining let me you now contact your regular team, get your appointment sorted’ things like this have been very well received and recognised, not only by patients, but also by the NHS community – so I think it's an overwhelming positive feedback, especially for the A&E Attend Anywhere service.

Welcome to Attend Anywhere, Moorfields Eye Hospital's video consultation service.

Video consultations are convenient, safe, and easy to use. They enable you to have your appointment via a secure video environment from the comfort of your own home.

Your clinical team will have assessed your case before inviting you to attend a video consultation and should you need to be assessed or treated in person you will be sent a follow-up appointment to attend one of our clinics.

In your appointment letter, you will find a link to a short video guide explaining how to log on to the service and what devices and internet access you will need. Video calls are free for patients, though you will need to have internet access.

When you have logged onto the service for your appointment, you will be greeted by one of our virtual receptionists. The receptionist will ask you to confirm your name, date of birth, first line of address and postcode, in order to verify they are speaking to the correct patient. You will also be asked to confirm your telephone number, email address and GP details.

If any of these details have changed, the receptionist will update these for you. Your personal details are not stored in the system and your call is not recorded.

You will then be transferred to the correct virtual clinic waiting area and the receptionist will exit the call. The clinician will join the call as soon as they become available and you will have your consultation. Please be reassured that if you experience any technical difficulties during the call, we will attempt to call you on the contact number you have provided us with.

Patients who've used the service have found it to be simple to use, convenient and have found their appointments to be a positive experience.

A video consultation is very different and it's new to a lot of the patients than coming to the hospital. But what I can reassure you is that we have done lots of studies in previous audits to show that these are particular conditions that are suitable to be seen safely on video consultations.

So, a lot of our conditions do not require a use of a microscope like in the clinic setting, so we can see most of the abnormality surrounding the eyeball or the eyelids over the video or sometimes implemented by a photograph. So, it is very easy for us to diagnose and manage the conditions even though you're not in the same clinical space as I am.

But, if you have concerns that the problems will not be completely addressed over the video consultation, if you have any concern, you can raise that with us during a video consultation and we can arrange to see you in a face-to-face clinic. And if there are things that you're unable to ascertain over a video, then we will invite you for a face-to-face consultation at a later date.