Eastern Ontario is getting an extra $950,000 a year in provincial funding to expand a telemedicine program that allows rural residents to get speedier care closer to home.
The expanded program would allow more patients in the Ottawa Valley to meet by video conference with medical specialists at The Ottawa Hospital.
Officials say patients would no longer have to travel as often to the city for appointments, nor would they have to pay the hospital's hefty parking fees. Instead, they could go to select health facilities closer to home - in Pembroke, Hawkesbury, Lanark or Arnprior - that have the video-conferencing equipment and specially trained nurses to facilitate appointments.
The program has the potential to slash wait times for medical consultations with in-demand specialists, who could squeeze more appointments into a day using telemedicine, says Chantale LeClerc, chief executive of the Champlain Local Health Integration Network, Eastern Ontario's health authority.
Telemedicine has become an increasingly popular way for rural residents to get speedier health services. In Eastern Ontario, the number of telemedicine consultations has grown to more than 14,000 this year, up from 11,500 in 2010-11. Nearly two-thirds of those consultations have been for mental health and addictions counselling.
The expanded program, expected to be rolled out by June, would allow 15 additional nurses to be hired and add another 4,000 telemedicine consultations annually. It would be targeted mainly at patients needing mental-health services, diabetes care and medical assessments before and after surgery.
Meanwhile, the region is also getting an extra $737,400 a year in provincial funding to expand a transportation program for seniors. The program is aimed at seniors who live on their own and need rides to get to medical appointments or adult day programs.
Currently, the program provides more than 150,000 rides a year to some 10,000 clients. However, the demand continues to outpace supply, given that the region has 40,000 seniors living alone.
Officials say the most vulnerable seniors are those with kidney disease who require regular dialysis. When they miss appointments because they can't find rides, they're more likely to develop complications that result in trips to hospital emergency rooms. In Ottawa alone, an estimated 800 seniors require regular rides to get to dialysis appointments.
The extra funding would pay for new vans, the retrofit of existing vans, extra drivers and logistics systems to co-ordinate the vans so that they could be used more efficiently.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Pauline Tam
Quelle/Source: Ottawa Citizen, 23.02.2012
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