Lucas Seuren

My work focuses on understanding how doctors and patients communicate during consultations, and how these communication strategies influence quality of care.

Currently, my research is aimed at video consultations: those are consultations that are conducted through an online medium such as Skype or FaceTime. The goal is to determine whether these consultations are beneficial and what is required for patients and doctors to have a 'good quality' video consultation.

The area that I am interested is how the technology affects the conversation, particularly the possibility of doing a physical examination. Because patients and clinicians are not in the same space, the clinician cannot use their own sensory experiences (such as touch and sight) to examine the patient. Instead they have to rely on what they can see through the screen and what the patients shows and tells: the patient becomes the clinician's eyes, ears, and hands. My aim is to analyse how that changes the physical examination, and what that means for using video consultations across the NHS.