Telemedicine is a clinical telephone and video conferencing service for care home residents who acutely deteriorate. The service is hosted at Hampshire Hospitals, but available to care homes Hampshire wide. Our service supports over 200 care homes across the county – including Residential, Nursing and Learning Disability homes.
The service has been running since April 2020, with the help and support of Hampshire Hospitals Foundation Trust and Hampshire, Southampton and Isle of Wight CCG. We work closely with care home Nurse Facilitators, GPs, Paramedics, hospital Doctors and many more partners, to provide local and specialised care.
The service is completely free to use and can support all care homes with:
- Clinical advice and/or support
- Transfers into hospital
- Prescriptions
- End of life care and advice
Telemedicine aims to benefit care homes by helping shared decision-making between you, family, the GP, hospital doctors and ambulance services. Instance access to the team will enable residents to receive faster care in the comfort of their own home, reducing the need to move the resident to an emergency department or another health care setting.
Visit telemedicinehampshire.nhs.uk for more information and resources.
The Telemedicine Service is part of the NHS and offers FREE support to care homes and their residents across Hampshire and Isle of Wight. The service provides instant access for care homes to virtually talk to a specialist team about their residents who are experiencing a sudden and unexpected decline in their health.
The Telemedicine service for care homes offers an effective means to care for people in the right place and at the right time, providing access to specialist service and teams and signposting where appropriate. This will enable residents to receive faster care in the comfort of their own home, reducing the need to move the resident to an emergency department or another health care setting.
Care homes can contact the service for a range of sudden and unexpected health events such as (but is not limited to):
- New rashes
- Increased breathlessness
- Falls
- General Deterioration
- Suspected infections
- Acute pain
- Raised NEWS2 or RESTORE2 score
- Sudden or increased confusion
- Raised temperature
The service is available 7 days a week, between 8am and 10pm.
For residents, the service will:
- Make sure they receive the right care, at the right time, in the right place. Telemedicine supports a joint approach to clinical care in the residents’ own environment
- Enable them to stay at home and will reduce their likelihood of being agitated, disorientated and delirious
- Reduce the risk of hospital acquired infections, falls and deconditioning
- Enable them to die in their place of choice
- Improve their experience and enhance their quality of life
For the Care Home, the service will:
- Expedite access to secondary care professionals with experience of assessing and managing acute exacerbation for individuals living with frailty
- Provide a real time, two-way discussion about deteriorating patients
- Support the development of an agreed risk sharing plan about how to manage residents
- Provide increased staff confidence and competence
- Provides a speedy response and access to experienced clinicians at no cost
- Offer follow up support post initial consultation
- Facilitate with any onward referrals such as 111/GP/SCAS on your behalf
For the NHS, the service will:
- Support the appropriate utilisation of the workforce and resources
- Improve bed flow, reduce the number of delayed transfers of care and reduce the length of stay of admitted patients, resulting in improved system resilience
- Reduce demand on Out of Hours (OOH) services