Telehealth—Improving access for rural, regional and remote communities
Telehealth—Improving access for rural, regional and remote communities Journal Article
Australian Journal of Rural Health
- Author(s): O’Kane, Gabrielle
- Published: 2020
- Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- Volume: 28
- ISBN: 1038-5282
Abstract: Previous research published in this journal has already demonstrated that using telehealth-based models of care can have benefits for those residing in rural and remote communities, the health care provider and the system. One study showed that telehealth can be successfully applied to the management of patients with a spinal fracture, which allowed the patient to be cared for in their local rural hospital and offered opportunities for allied health professionals to upskill and work to their full scope of practice, while also providing cost efficiencies for the health service. Another innovative application of telehealth was an integrated approach to oral health in rural aged care facilities with an oral health therapist screening residents using an intraoral camera probe that transmitted a live feed to a dentist in another health care facility.4 With so few dentists living in rural and remote Australia, there is real opportunity to scale up this sort of application of telehealth for other population groups such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in remote communities. In rural and remote education settings, speech pathology teletherapy services have been able to overcome limited connectivity issues by successfully using low-bandwidth videoconferencing facilities.6 These examples demonstrate that telehealth can offer rural and remote communities a more flexible and convenient mode of access to health care, while also upskilling rural health generalists, parents and educators by linking them and their patients or clients to urban-based specialists.