- Title
- Video-telehealth to support clinical assessment and management of acutely unwell older people in residential aged care: a pre-post intervention study
- Creator
- Hullick, Carolyn; Conway, Jane; Hall, Alix; Murdoch, Wendy; Cole, Janean; Hewitt, Jacqueline; Oldmeadow, Christopher; Attia, John
- Relation
- BMC Geriatrics Vol. 22, Issue 1, no. 40
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02703-y
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Background: Older people living in Residential Aged Care (RAC) are at high risk of clinical deterioration. Telehealth has the potential to provide timely, patient-centred care where transfer to hospital can be a burden and avoided. The extent to which video telehealth is superior to other forms of telecommunication and its impact on management of acutely unwell residents in aged care facilities has not been explored previously. Methods: In this study, video-telehealth consultation was added to an existing program, the Aged Care Emergency (ACE) program, aiming at further reducing Emergency Department (ED) visits and hospital admissions. This controlled pre-post study introduced video-telehealth consultation as an additional component to the ACE program for acutely unwell residents in RACs. Usual practice is for RACs and ACE to liaise via telephone. During the study, when the intervention RACs called the ED advanced practice nurse, video-telehealth supported clinical assessment and management. Five intervention RACs were compared with eight control RACs, all of whom refer to one community hospital in regional New South Wales, Australia. Fourteen months pre-video-telehealth was compared with 14 months post-video-telehealth using generalized linear mixed models for hospital admissions after an ED visit and ED visits. One thousand two hundred seventy-one ED visits occurred over the 28-month study period with 739 subsequent hospital admissions. Results: There were no significant differences in hospital admission or ED visits after the introduction of video-telehealth; adjusted incident rate ratios (IRR) were 0.98 (confidence interval (CI) 0.55 to 1.77) and 0.89 (95% CI 0.53 to 1.47) respectively. Conclusions: Video-telehealth did not show any incremental benefit when added to a structured hospital avoidance program with nursing telephone support.
- Subject
- telemedicine; long-term care; geriatric emergency medicine; aged; avoidable hospitalization; nursing
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1469601
- Identifier
- uon:48285
- Identifier
- ISSN:1471-2318
- Rights
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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