Patients need face-to-face care

What a year it has been. Over the past 12 months we have been pulled from our usual roles as urology nurse specialists to be intensive therapy unit (ITU) nurses and back again into our regular roles, but with a totally new way of working.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our usual services and flipped our regular way of working upside down. It has been so difficult to go from a busy week filled with clinics, face-to-face conversations on new diagnoses and multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings, to telephone consultations, Microsoft Teams and video calls. But is this way of working the future?

I for one have really missed the engagement of face-to-face meetings and clinics. However, with the pandemic against us, we have had to change and adapt to the new virtual way of working. In urology, we have to perform a lot of physical examinations, whether that is a check for prostate cancer, an erectile dysfunction clinic or siting a patient for an ileal conduit—it has been extremely challenging to somehow manage these patients virtually.