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[Bowdon]

I'm going to be having some hospital appointment sessions that require 12 appointments. Apart from the hospital being hours away from me, I'm nearly fully housebound these days. In conversation when setting up the consultation they said they can have appointments over the internet via skype and I assume a webcam will be needed for this.

I had a webcam many years ago but never really used it much.

So does anyone have any webcam recommendations? It will have to be Win10 compatible.

[Weaver]

I had very good results with a Logitech swivelling webcam. Very well-behaved windows drivers were of prime importance to me as without that all else is lost and you can end up knackering your entire machine.

I use Apple Facetime nowadays which is excellent. I believe the NHS has even heard or that, because I have refused to travel 85 miles each way to hospital in Inverness but some consultant keeps pestering me and I think wants to do some kind of session using Facetime perhaps.

[j0hn]

I have a Logitech C920 webcam.
Fantastic little webcam for the price.
Is regularly on offer in the £30 region.

[Weaver]

I bought two Logitech ones for a customer in fact. One thing though, which is not much of a criticism: on an extremely ancient and very very crappy PC the logitech-supplied software ran the CPU up to 100% sometimes. That could have been a very badly designed bit of app code, polling in an uncontrolled way. It was just during certain activities iirc. The CPUs concerned were out of the stone age so modern machines might have no problem.

[Weaver]

Plus sorry to hear that you are nearly housebound. I don't go downstairs anymore but I can walk ok, as far as the bathroom next door with no problem, it is just that being upright makes me feel horrible sometimes.

[burakkucat]

I, too, will recommend that you consider one of the various Logitech webcams.

[Bowdon]

Thanks for the replies guys. I was thinking of logitech. The last was that brand. It's good to know they are still good!

This is the first time I've seen the NHS embrace technology like this. Let's hope we see more of this kind of thing deployed in the future.

[Weaver]

Absolutely. The waste especially up here of having staff travel hundred of miles across country just to talk to patients is amazing, and those journey can easily involve overnight states too. If you have a seven hour round trip journey and the weather is vile too it all gets a bit ridiculous.

The NHS is so unbelievably inefficient and wasteful. a half the time they don't even use email. I can hardly believe it but I get the impression that they are still actually using snail-mail. I can email one or two consultants, but I am not sure if I can even email the local doctors. One kindly GP now comes to the house from time to time but I have decided that I am not going to the doctors’ surgery any more. It is just too much pain and sickness and it is not worth it. Could all be done on the phone or by email anyway. And the whole business of people having to take time off work so they can go to the doctors is crazy, that should just be done with a phone call.

When I used to see one of my consultants half of the time was wasted every session just spent filling her in with the current load of drugs that I am in now. Why on earth did she not just know ? Why could she not just look me up? And in any case if due to some bizarre failing she could not look me up I could just have emailed her in advance to get it all out of the way.