Prateek Verma and Michael Slattery
Swansea Bay University Health Board
Increased regionalisation of specialist healthcare and available resources has created a need for transfer services to ensure uninterrupted access to high-quality, equitable and patient-centred care. Variations in background and experience within transfer team members create differences in the care provided. Rural hospitals struggle with staffing issues, especially out of hours. Remote clinical support is therefore essential to ensure that delivery of high-quality critical care is a process not a location.
This project aims to develop the use of Mixed Reality Headsets to view a 360-degree livestream of the clinical environment, thereby allowing remote support teams to be virtually present and therefore fully immersed in the situation. This would be combined with the ability to view multiple screens simultaneously within the headset, avoiding the need for multiple devices, thus reducing costs and increasing productivity.
Through a collaboration between medical and technical teams, we’d be able to identify the best options and potential alternatives for each component of this system, produce a working prototype and ensure that this new infrastructure is compliant with the existing cyber security protocols.
This setup would give us the ability to process and present data in a better thought out and a more sensible manner. This innovation in telemedicine will enable the creation of a robust remote support network, ensuring equity for all patients in Wales by removing geography as a barrier to accessing specialist healthcare and by enabling the safe transfer of higher acuity sicker patients over long distances, thereby ensuring need not distance drives decision to transfer. With the expansion of advanced practice within Wales, the opportunity exists to incorporate more practitioner led transfers, potentially enabling staff retention within critical care and efficient use of financial resources.
The potential benefits of this system could be extended to any patient requiring support in the remote environment.
