ABSTRACT
The UCL Huntington's Disease Centre Multidisciplinary clinic sees over 1,000 patients who from across the country. During the SARS-Covid19 pandemic, the clinic shifted to 100% remote consultation, using the video platform Circuit by Unify (https://eu.yourcircuit.com). The introduction of video platform enabled the clinic to operate throughout the pandemic. After the relaxation of local guidelines, most appointments have returned to in-person appointments, however, some patients, especially distant and care-home residents, continue to request video appointments. Given it is likely that video appointments will be a permanent addition to the service, we set out to evaluate the user experience from our patients to assess whether the video appointments are meeting their needs. To this end, we designed our electronic form specific to our centre, and sent to 100 patients and their carers who used the platform in the preceding 6 months. The survey addresses aspects of patient satisfaction such as convenience of location, technical issues of using the video platform, and waiting times, as well as overall clinical experience. The results will be analysed in two groups. Group 1 will be those without acute psychiatric illnesses, and Group 2 will be those with acute psychiatric illnesses. I will present the results our audit with these groups to evaluate the patient experience of virtual clinic appointments.
ABSTRACT
Since the identification of COVID-19, its various manifestations have been reported in numerous studies. However, few studies have specifically examined the electrolyte imbalances seen in this disease. Patients with a definitive diagnosis of COVID-19 admitted to our hospital entered this retrospective cross-sectional study. Upon admission of the patients, a blood sample was sent for the analysis of the electrolytes. The relationship between electrolyte imbalances and disease severity, ICU admission, and mortality was also stated. Of 1072 hospitalized patients studied, 657 were men, and 415 were women. The prevalence of hypocalcemia (47.7%), hypophosphatemia (21.1%), hypomagnesemia (15.8%), and hyponatremia (13%) was higher compared to other electrolyte imbalances in these patients. Lower levels of sodium, calcium, and magnesium were seen in severe cases, while higher serum levels of potassium and phosphorus were detected in severe cases and ICU hospitalized patients. Causes such as albumin decrease in inflammation, the role of PTH, and the effect of vitamin D can play a role in hypocalcemia in these patients. In addition, electrolyte loss from the digestive tract can contribute to electrolyte imbalances. Because of the high prevalence of electrolyte imbalance in these patients, electrolyte monitoring is recommended in COVID-19 patients to ensure better care. © 2022, Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.