Remote medical consultation, easy option to care for non-communicable diseases — Experts

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3 years ago

REMOTE consulting is a feasible and acceptable option for providing routine care for patients with non-communicable diseases, particularly hypertension, and therefore efforts should be made by the government to ensure it becomes a composite of the primary healthcare services, a study has said.

In the study, researchers found that remote consulting will not affect patient safety at the primary healthcare facility or their trust in primary care consultations for long term conditions like hypertension.

The trial tagged “REmote Consulting in Primary Healthcare (REaCH) for chronic disease populations in Africa”, involved 35 Primary Healthcare facilities in 11 local government councils in Oyo State. It was funded by UK Research and Innovation, Global Challenges Research Fund and Newton Fund (UKRI GCRF/Newton Fund).

Professor Eme Owoaje, speaking at its dissemination in Ibadan tagged “ÇOVID-19: Determining Trustworthiness and Safety of Remote Consulting in Primary Healthcare for Chronic Disease Populations in Africa”, said with remote consulting, there was no change in face to face consulting, prescribing and investigation rate.

According to her, “also, patient trust and engagement with their healthcare did not change but the patient trust and engagement with healthcare varied across clusters of health facility.”

Lead Investigator of the REaCH trial in Nigeria, Professor Akinyinka Omigbodun said remote consultation, healthcare services can be provided without the patients necessarily having to come physically to the health facilities.

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Omigbodun stated, “Our findings showed that training the health workers led to increasing in the use of remote consulting and the health workers said it reduced the number of patients coming physically to the health facilities yet the patients were still getting the services they needed.

“Secondly, it looked as if the quality of care the patients were receiving did not change and also the patients still had trust in the treatment rendered through remote consulting. All our expectations were met.

“What we then need to do now is to upscale this kind of training to cover all the health facilities in Oyo state to start with and other parts of the nation. Also, we need to educate the public so that they will know that this kind of service is available. There are certain things we can take care of without coming to the health facility. The facilities will be less crowded and the healthcare providers will be able to concentrate on the fewer.

“We hope that when policymakers see that it is something that can work and be of benefit to the population; they can devote a part of the health budget towards making this kind of service available. It is not replacing physical consultations but complementing them and making them more efficient.”

REaCH’s Principal investigator and Professor at King’s College UK, Jackie Sturt stated that there is almost no mobile phone remote consulting in low and medium-income countries (LMIC) despite its potential for delivering quality healthcare to marginalised populations.

She stated that remote consultation ensured the health workforce might be deployed more flexibly, offer economic advantages to patients, contribute to universal healthcare coverage and could help save lives of healthcare workers and the population during pandemics.