Virtual care is becoming increasingly important for the delivery of high-quality care in the community. Virtual Care Pathways (VCPs) are being developed, with an increase during the COVID-19 pandemic, to sustainably improve access to health care by reducing unnecessary travel and wait times to receive specialist support. Consumers and clinicians have sought to maintain virtual care as a sustainable and readily scalable option for healthcare beyond the pandemic however there is some concern about the loss of social interaction, lack of physical examination and low digital literacy. Maintaining opportunities for face-to-face interactions while enhancing access to specialist support on country is particularly important to Aboriginal patients living in remote communities.
What is the issue for NSW?
While evidence is growing about the benefit of VCP models for care in general, there is a fundamental gap in knowledge about how these services can be designed and delivered to support value-based care for regional and rural Aboriginal communities.
More research is needed on how these models impact safety, experience and efficiency of virtual care delivered to Aboriginal communities. There is a paucity of literature describing virtual models of care that have been co-designed with Aboriginal communities and a limited understanding of community preferences for engagement with virtual care, particularly how these services can be delivered in a culturally safe way.
What does the research aim to do and how?
This project aims to co-design an enhanced VCP for Aboriginal patients presenting to Broken Hill Base Hospital Emergency Department. The enhanced VCP will build on an existing pathway that uses virtual care to provide access to specialist clinical support but doesn’t focus on the specific needs and preferences of local Aboriginal patients, which will be determined by using qualitative methods. In collaboration with Aboriginal patients and other stakeholders, the enhanced VCP will be evaluated against the Quintuple Aim of value-based health to determine its effectiveness, safety, acceptability, and equity from a patient, health system and societal perspective through quantitative and qualitative methods.