A new feature has been added to the regular meetings of the Sun Country Regional Health Authority, the governing body for Sun Country Health Region. At almost every meeting for the past few months, our quality improvement department has arranged for a patient to tell his/her story about the care received in our Region. Sometimes the care was very good and the patient tells us what we are doing right. Sometimes, the opposite is true and we hear about a serious shortcoming in our system.
Whatever the message, the exercise is a valuable reminder to the decision-makers that SCHR is building a patient-centred health care service, that every decision about resource allocation and funding priorities affects the kind of care received by the patients/clients/residents who come into our programs and facilities.
At one of these sessions recently, a patient talked about all the travelling her family had done to doctor's appointments outside the Region. When you are sick, or the weather is as bad as it has been this winter, those are not fun Sunday drives. They can be occasions for misery. Finally, one of the health authority members asked if she had ever used the telehealth system to try to reduce the number of these distant appointments. She'd never heard of it.
We've talked so much in public about telehealth over the past few years, advertised it, featured it in our publicity, and spent money expanding it, that we were all surprised by the statement. But health care people often work in a bubble - in the same way that other professionals do. Most of our jargon is unique to our systems; many of our processes are unique to health care. Sometimes we forget that people outside - the actual patients - don't understand what we are saying or don't pay attention to what we are doing until they need care for themselves.
So let me tell you again about our telehealth services. This winter has been a particularly good season for both patients and doctors to use telehealth. Our psychiatrists, for example, have been using it both for sessions with patients and for meetings with other mental health care staff about patients. Dr. Dele Oyebode says it has saved him a drive to Estevan every week. He tells me on each occasion he usually sees an average of seven patients a day. That means telehealth is saving him eight to 10 hours of driving per month.
He uses those hours for some other productive work rather than driving. It is very cost effective both physically and financially. The use of telehealth has prevented the need to cancel clinics number of times when the weather is bad.
Dr. Oyebode says his multidisciplinary team meetings are also much easier to do on telehealth. The meetings help with providing good client care, as every member of the team has input into the client's case without needing to travel to a meeting.
Telehealth has saved thousands of hours of travel and thousands of dollars in travel costs for patients, and now even more for doctors and psychiatrists as they become more familiar with it. Almost every facility in our Region has a telehealth unit that can connect you to a doctor or other health professional located somewhere else and the ones that don't have the system will soon have one. Your privacy is assured. Your time is respected. Telehealth is a very good system. Please help us get the word out. Won't you tell your neighbor about it?
