On Thursday, October 10, Murray Primary Health Network chief executive Matt Jones visited Stanhope Health with Kyabram District Health Service chief executive Anne McEvoy to see how the clinic’s new Telecare program had been progressing.
The service, which began taking appointments on Monday, August 12, addressed a 12-month drought of no allocated GP in Stanhope through a combination of face-to-face and weekly online telehealth consultations.
The service was part of a KDHS (which oversees Stanhope Health) strategy of making health care more accessible to regional towns, and it seems other organisations are taking notice.
The visit from Mr Jones came on the day that Stanhope Health had recorded the highest number of consultations since the service’s inception in August.
Stanhope Health Telecare GP Dr Ken-Tze Koh said the clinic had recorded 20 consultations that day.
He said the online telehealth consultations had been quieter than the two days he visits Stanhope for in-person appointments; however, having the option for patients to jump online and have a consultation was better than not being able to see anyone at all.
Ms McEvoy also underlined the importance of having an on-site nurse at Stanhope Health to assist those who needed help with telehealth consultations.
“It’s important to have that local support and local presence as well and to have someone here to help out,” she said.
Mr Jones said the future of rural health care was dire in its current form, so health organisations were exploring ways to make GPs more accessible to those areas.
“I can think of about 12 solo practices just off the top of my head where the current GP is going to be the last one that’s working — and they’re not going to be replaced because they can’t be,” Mr Jones said.
“We actually need different models, and they’ve got to be regionally structured so that there is more support for the local community, as well as offering a more attractive prospect of employment,” he said.
He said the main issue with rural health was health organisations were having difficulty getting GPs to ‘go regional’, for reasons including a lack of housing and tourism options, chosen specialities being unavailable and many students choosing general practice in metropolitan areas.
He also mentioned that while health organisations the size of Stanhope used to be the worst affected by this issue, towns with populations above 1500 were also being plagued by a lack of healthcare support.
Mr Jones said he would rather be at the forefront of seeing a change in how things were run in the rural health sector than “waiting until they have fallen over”.
He said the type of service Stanhope Health was providing to its community was “sustainable” and was a model to which other health services would be looking.
Stanhope Health’s Telecare clinic, which mixes online and in-person appointments, was the first of its kind in Victoria.
“There will be a real reluctance to be the last one of these practices to adapt to the times,” Mr Jones said.
“We have to provide these types of settings connected with all of the capability to make it attractive to GPs, and it’s about thinking how the health system is moving.
“Virtual and remote monitoring represents the start of that approach ... because there’s going to need to be those types of approaches in the future — pretty soon.”
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