Digital channels can be used “to safeguard precious face-to-face services” and drive up access and accessibility, Crooks said at the Scottish Centre for Telehealth and Telecare conference in Edinburgh last week.
“We are not about bringing about the death knell of face-toface care. Face-to-face care will always be important…but we need to plan how we deliver services in the future and exploit all channels of delivery,” he said.
Services are under increasing pressure and yet the way we deliver the vast majority of our conventional health services has not changed since 1948, he said.
However, he added that we are moving forward and “recognising now that technology has a part to play in delivering conventional services and can support service delivery.” Crooks said that “sound foundations” have been built on the sensible application of technology to support the delivery of services, as he praised the work already under way in Scotland in his presentation about supporting transition, integration and innovation in telehealth and telecare.
“Innovation is a great prize and we are blessed with a good number of innovators in Scotland, and risk takers,” he said.
The door is open in Scotland to capitalise on this, he argued.
“We can do it. In Scotland, unlike the vast majority of European countries, we have the strategic direction set out for us that has opened the door for us to walk through.” Speaking of the integration of the telecare programme’s activities to create the enlarged Scottish Centre for Telehealth and Telecare earlier this year, Crooks said the merger was “a very pragmatic and commonsense approach” that had been “eagerly supported”.
“It became abundantly clear to those of us working in the field that there was an absolute synergy between telehealth and telecare.
It wasn’t just that the people got on. It was very clear that parallel programmes, just by the fact of what they were doing and through common sense, were coming closer and closer together and becoming one.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Katie Mackintosh
Quelle/Source: Holyrood, 14.11.2011
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