One of the few positives of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented flexibility and willingness to embrace innovation in the delivery of healthcare services in the NHS. This change in mindset has presented a unique opportunity to rethink and transform outdated models of delivering outpatient care. There were 125 million recorded outpatient appointments in England in 2019-2020 (an increase of 66.9% from a decade ago), of which 3 million were for dermatology, the sixth-highest specialty by volume. Such intense pressure for appointments, combined with the well-documented staffing crisis in UK dermatology, means that the need for outpatient transformation is felt particularly acutely in our specialty.
Personal Health Records (PHRs) as a tool to support Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU): a dermatology perspective.