Several doctors in Harare have resorted to offering consultation services over the telephone in a development that is compromising the health of individuals. But Zimbabwe's Health Professions Authority (HPA) secretary general Shepherd Humure says in a report in The Standard: "The Health Professions Authority wishes to advise all members of the public against telephone health consultation or telephone health services which have emerged in the market."
The report quotes a specialist physician, who declined to be named for professional reasons, as saying that telephone consultations were not the best because there could be critical gaps in relation to the adequacy of data collected over the phone and premature conclusions. The physician added that wrong diagnoses could be high, particularly when dealing with patients unknown to the doctor.
The report says telephone consultation practices are prevalent in the West where a high proportion of out-of-hours calls are dealt with over the phone. A study recently carried out in the UK however showed that 33% of patients who received medical advice over the telephone had originally wanted a home visit. Out of all those patients, 25% were unhappy with the telephone advice, with 49% indicating that they would have preferred a home visit.
[link url="http://allafrica.com/stories/201503080356.html"]Full report in The Standard[/link]