Evaluation Of The Near Me Video Consulting Service In Scotland During Covid-19, 2020

23rd March 2021

This report presents the findings of an external evaluation of the rapid scaling-up of the Near Me video consultation service across health and care services in Scotland during 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The evaluation explores the process of scaling-up and expanding the use of Near Me within hospital and community care settings, GP services and care homes. It makes recommendations relevant to future scaling-up, spread and sustainability of video consulting services in health and care.

Near Me is the public-facing name for the video consulting (VC) service used across health and social care in Scotland. Near Me clinics have been established in both primary and secondary care, in all local territorial NHS boards and in the Golden Jubilee National

Hospital (NHS Scotland's National Waiting Times Centre), as well as in a range of Health and Social Care Partnerships, Local Authorities and third sector organisations.

In June 2020 the Scottish Government commissioned the University of Oxford to conduct an independent evaluation of the Technology Enabled Care (TEC) initiative for the rapid rollout of Near Me video consultations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The field

work was conducted during June-October 2020 by a research team based within the Interdisciplinary Research in Health Sciences (IRIHS) unit at the University of Oxford. This builds on a previous evaluation conducted by the IRIHS team in Scotland in 2019, before

the COVID-19 pandemic.

Near Me is the public-facing name used to describe video consulting services provided via the Attend Anywhere platform in Scotland. This name was developed by patients in NHS Highland, and was in near-universal use across Scotland at the time of the fieldwork for this evaluation.

Attend Anywhere is the name of the video consultations platform, purpose-built to meet the needs of the health and care sectors, for which a national licence has been procured for Scotland.

For the purposes of this evaluation report, the term ‘Near Me' is generally used, unless research participants referred specifically to ‘Attend Anywhere'.

Read the Summary report HERE

Read the Main report HERE