A new research collaboration from Flinders University will seek to ensure the services are running as best they can, thanks to almost $1 million in funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Led by health economist Professor Jonathan Karnon from Flinders University’s College of Medicine and Public Health, the project will work with current virtual EDs across five states to compare their performances, see which methods work the best and seek to improve them.
“Virtual EDs have a central role in managing demand for our public hospital system, however across South Australia, Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland where the various services have all been set up independently from each other, we see five separate systems with distinct differences in how they operate,” says Professor Karnon.
“They differ in how patients are referred, for example, some services can be directly accessed by members of the public, whilst other services require a referral. There are also differences in who can provide a referral.
“However, they all have the same aim to provide appropriate care for non-life-threatening emergencies in the community, providing care in patients’ usual residence and transferring or referring patients to community-based services such as urgent care centres and hospital-in-the-home services.
“We want to look at each service available and learn from all of them, with the aim being to support the states to work out what is the best way to provide their particular virtual ED service and find improvements in their implementation and design for the betterment of patients.”
Each service will be compared on:
- Patient safety: are patients receiving appropriate care?
- Service quality: monitoring quality indicators to inform options to improve the provision of virtual ED care.
- Service design: are patients being appropriately referred to virtual ED services?
