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Patients appreciate flexibility of lockdown-expedited move to virtual care

No traffic hassles. No fighting for hospital parking. No long waits in boring medical offices.

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No traffic hassles. No fighting for hospital parking. No long waits in boring medical offices.

Doctors and patients at a London hospital, forced by the COVID-19 lockdown to meet online, have found virtual medicine is such a good thing, many would like to hang onto it post-pandemic.

“People are really appreciating the flexibility and the opportunity that virtual care provides. . . . It’s been a fairly consistent theme we’ve heard from people,” said Glen Kearns, vice-president of diagnostic imaging and chief information officer at London Health Sciences Centre and St. Joseph’s Health Care London.

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“Virtual care is an incredibly effective means of getting patients access to members of their health care team.”

St. Joseph’s already was involved in a virtual care pilot project when the COVID-19 lockdown struck, but had to ramp up its remote care capabilities quickly, Kearns said.

Pre-pandemic, St. Joseph’s staff were completing about 200 virtual care sessions daily. At the peak of the lockdown, the number was nearly 1,500 each day.

“In the past week, we’ve been hitting around 1,007 virtual visits per day. . . . That’s an average, over the last four weeks, of 49 per cent of the patient volumes that we’re serving being virtual,” Kearns said.

St. Joseph’s has had virtual care in its strategic plan for at least two years and has a goal of making fifty per cent of its outpatient ambulatory care appointments virtual in the future, Kearns said.

Though patient response to virtual care through the lockdown has been mostly positive, the system isn’t perfect yet, Kearns said.

Hospital staff need to develop clear criteria for the types of patients who could be well-served by the online appointments. There are also opportunities to integrate monitoring devices into virtual care so health care workers can track vital signs remotely, Kearns said.

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Stroke survivor Beth Miller wants to see a hybrid model of in-person appointments and virtual sessions become the new normal of medical care.

The 39-year-old mother of three from Komoka began having mobility issues in her right leg in early January. When the condition worsened and spread to her right hand, she went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with a hemorrhagic stroke, or brain bleed.

“The news was shocking. . . . I didn’t even know it was possible to have a stroke at my age,” Miller said. “I had gone from a really avid runner to someone who couldn’t even wiggle their toes. It was life-changing.”

She spent two weeks at University Hospital before she was transferred to Parkwood Institute, where she spent three weeks in its inpatient rehabilitation program. She was discharged and had only just begun outpatient in-person therapy at Parkwood twice a week when the lockdown set in.

“I was unsure about what was going to happen next,” Miller said.

With her webcam, Miller began virtual sessions with her occupational therapist and physiotherapist a couple weeks after the lockdown began. She’s grateful for the opportunity to continue her rehabilitation from home.

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“They could see me completing all my activities and exercises through the virtual care system,” Miller said. “I wasn’t isolated from my team of therapists or doctors. I could continue to strengthen physically, cognitively and mentally because of virtual care. I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for virtual care.”

Virtual doctor visits also have proven useful in identifying and addressing possible COVID-19 infections in the region.

Nearly 30,000 people in Southwestern Ontario have completed the online self-assessment at covid19checkup.ca since it launched, with 935 people getting one-on-one virtual assessments with an on-call doctor through the Ontario Health West program.

Though virtual care was possible before the pandemic, COVID-19 opened the floodgates, said Blraju Doshi, a Windsor family doctor who is on the on-call roster for the virtual assessments.

“I think it forced all of us to adopt virtual care. It’s definitely is a future part of care. I don’t believe it’s going to replace the traditional way of providing health care, but at the same time I think it is something we should integrate long-term,” Doshi said.

jbieman@postmedia.com

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