Capitalising on the momentum of Covid-19
Resistance to change is a key barrier to digital transformation. Covid-19 has seen this barrier to implementing telehealth rapidly broken down amongst
through barriers around change management and culture. “With any change process you always have leaders and early adopters and we had quite a number in November last year, but the majority of clinicians hadn’t had the opportunity to experience it,” he explains. “Medical professionals are generally quite conservative about changing patterns of work they’ve been doing for a long time and we do need a bit of a pivot point to say, ‘actually we have to do this differently, it’s not nice to have it’s a must have’, and that’s what Covid-19 gave us.” “They’ve been given the impetus, but we have to support them so their experience of doing telehealth for the first time is reasonable and good and they have the skills to do it,” he says. A Northern DHB telehealth briefing paper says “Covid-19 has converted many to a new way of working and at least a new way of thinking. The focus has now shifted to embedding telehealth into business as usual as a significant contributor to improved patient access, timeliness and quality of care.” For resources on implementing telehealth, see the NZ Telehealth Forum and Resource Centre.
organisations, health care professionals and patients.
DHBs recognise the need to capitalise on that momentum and acceptance of change, but have also in many cases had to put the brakes on telehealth use, while they build a lasting service going forward. Large says there is no easy answer to that problem, but “if we continue to deliver a shoddy technology with poor supporting tools, then we will rapidly lose willing clinicians”. “We need to accept that we should get this right. What I would love to see nationally is people saying, ‘we may be parking the difficult parts for now but here is our roadmap so that we are clear with what we need to deliver and when’,” she explains. While work goes on to get the technology and enablers in place, a lot can be done in parallel to look at services and consider what needs to be done to upskill clinicians and patients, “particularly those who are disadvantaged or those who we know need the service most,” she says. “It’s a really good opportunity for DHBs up and down the country to look at those places that have done these things well at speed.” Chief medical officer at Waitematā DHB, Jonathan Christiansen, says that while the tools were in place to deliver telehealth prior to the pandemic, Covid-19 helped break
"The focus has now shifted to embedding telehealth into business as usual."
hinz .org.nz
TELEHEALTH OCTOBER 2020 : : 13
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