The WACHS chair says the state has been at the forefront of ‘pushing boundaries’ and enhancing care for rural communities through telehealth.
Western Australia Country Health Service’s telehealth service is “leading the way” in Australia with its use of virtual care to enhance healthcare delivery in remote and rural settings, according to board chair Dr Neale Fong.
Speaking on HIMSS TV regarding WACHS’s current and future digital health agenda, Dr Fong said virtual care was indisputably vital to uplifting the scope and quality of public healthcare services in remote and regional areas, particularly in addressing the challenges of staffing in-person services amid ongoing workforce shortages.
“We’ve had a vision in rural and remote health in Western Australia that if you can do good healthcare there you can do it anywhere, but the good healthcare is about a digital journey,” said Dr Fong, who is also CEO of private hospital operator Bethesda Health Care.
“Because we’re spread out so far across [such] a wide distance with very small populations, we can’t actually have a workforce consistently in each of those different places, so the answer was let’s move to a digital transformation.”
According to Dr Fong, WACHS had set the ball rolling in Australia in terms of this “digital transformation” through the implementation and ongoing expansion of its emergency telehealth initiative, including the potential addition of remote in-patient monitoring capabilities to reduce the need for patients to travel outside their local community or region.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years [WACHS] has led the way in virtual health through telehealth services, [starting] with the emergency telehealth service,” he said.
“This year we’ve provided nearly 37,000 emergency telehealth consultations through our network of 100 plus hospitals and nursing posts and small health centres, and we’ve expanded this telehealth service, which most people are now trying to do post covid, into maternity and obstetrics emergency care and mental health.
“This year, for example, nearly 4000 mental health consultations were done virtually, which never would have been done before. Those people would have been packed into a car or plane and brought down to one of our major cities. So we’re really excited about how we can push the boundaries.
“If you can do it in Western Australia, across that great distance, then you can do it anywhere.”
When asked about his long-term ambitions for improving healthcare services on a broad scale, Dr Fong said closing the gap in health outcomes and life expectancy for regional and remote communities by providing equitable access to high-quality health services was his key priority.
“[My] pipedream would be that the people that live in Western Australia’s remote and rural settings get access to care that is equivalent to the care [delivered] in a capital city,” he said.
“We know that people who live in rural and regional areas of Australia have a 14-year lower lifespan than someone who lives in a major city, and that’s just not good enough.
“We need to provide those services and if we can’t provide them everywhere through actual people … then we can do it using technology.”
The full interview with Dr Neale Fong and Thiru Gunasegaran, managing editor at Healthcare IT News, is available here.