Virtual nursing service supports aged care

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Thirty aged care facilities nationwide are using a virtual nursing service to ensure they have Registered Nurse cover overnight and for other essential shifts.

Emergency Consult started providing the online service in early 2022. Chief executive Jenni Falconer says there are benefits to residents, staff, and the wider health system, by providing Registered Nurse (RN) cover remotely.

“In the time we've been doing this, there has been a marked decrease in the number of ambulance call-outs at participating facilities, which is great for our health system as it prevents unnecessary trips, but also great for the patient who doesn’t have to leave their home environment,” she says.

Emergency Consult RNs provide cover to facilities via telehealth, doing a virtual assessment (via video call a tablet device) of any residents that a health care assistant (HCA) or onsite nurse has concerns about.

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They can enable the HCA to provide care under their direction and supervision, including remotely checking and observing the administration of medication, such as extra pain relief.

The nurses can also escalate via telehealth to an emergency medicine specialist when needed.

Emergency Consult aged care nurse lead Jo Sier says, “we have teams of nurses that look after certain facilities, so we become an extension of their team and get to know the residents in that facility”.

Bupa Villages and Aged Care NZ has 18 care homes using Emergency Consult.

Barbara Garbutt, Bupa regional operations manager, says they introduced the telehealth service in March 2022, “to ensure we could continue to deliver high quality care to our residents while dealing with Covid outbreaks, winter sickness and national nursing shortages.

“Throughout the year, we piloted the programme predominantly through night shifts to ensure after-hours access to registered nurses and Emergency Department physicians for virtual consultations and advice if our sites are staffed by caregivers during a shift,” she says.

Garbutt says the pilot has been a success. Residents continue to receive a high level of care and report the consultations to be a seamless experience.

“While Bupa’s nursing vacancies are below the sector average, we expect to continue to use this service while we manage staffing levels through the national nurse shortage and respond to covid,” she says.

Falconer says staffing and workforce are the biggest issues facing the aged care sector, which struggles with lower pay rates than public hospitals and recent immigration issues, which have meant there has not been a steady stream of new nurses coming into the country.

“We're very fortunate at Emergency Consult to have a large nursing workforce that was looking to do something differently, so supporting the aged care sector made sense,” she says.

Picture: Barbara Garbutt, Bupa regional operations manager

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