Ansökanommedelinom ramen försatsningpåGlobalautmaningar
Kirk Sullivan / AsbørgWestum / Alison Moore
Health for all: the nexus of the digital, the global and the medical
Aim:To improve e-communication between general practitioners and health care clients. Ultimately our group’s objective is to improve the training of general practitioners who work in tele-medicine so that they provide the best possible initial consultation. Having appropriate communicative and linguistic skills to create a useful initial contact at a distance is another layer of competence that is demanded of these general practitioners. Current research in tele-medicine focuses on specialist care, c.f. initial contact, for example, post-operative care.
There is an increasing global need to provide health care in contexts where ainitial physical meeting with general practice is impossible. This may be due to
- migration because of conflict, natural disaster, or economic crisis
- distance to a health care centre, for example in Northern Sápmi, central Australia, and the Northern Canada
- the complexity of physically getting to the health centre because of age, disability, lack of public transport
- lack of time
The challenges of migration are currently topical, yet how to provide general practice healthcare when the client and general practitioner are unable to communicate beyond using gestures. Being able to communicate in their mother language with a general practitioner in another place, or even country, using digital technologies, e.g. mobile phones and tablets, may alleviate this problem.
The challenges of distance to health care in sparsely populated regions is not a new challenge, for exampleThe Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia based in Alice Spring, NT, Australia that has used radios and aeroplanes since 1928, yet new digital technologies afford better solutions. A mobile device with a video-based chat has the potential to provide the general practitioner with better information, as they can see the client, than is available via oral description only.
The challenges physically getting to the health centre are numerous and can discourage people making contact with their general practitioner as the effort required to get there is too great. As health provision become increasingly centralised due to, among other things, urbanisation and demands for increasing efficiency, this challenge with grown globally and became societal challenge. A mobile device with a video-based chat has the potential to allow clients to contact a general practitioner from the comfort of their own home.
The challenge of lack of time is becoming a global challenge and if people do not have time to take their health seriously, this will have major impacts on the health care system—clients will make first contact with the health care system once the health problem is major. This will result in the need for more expensive care.
In many of contexts, the client will not know the general practitioner, and they will never meet the general practitioner in person. This increases the complexity and linguistic/communicative demands placed on the general practitioner working in these contexts.
The core research team consists of Professor Kirk P H Sullivan, Dr AsbjørgWestum, and Dr Alison Moore of the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. Dr Alison Moore is a linguist with a degree of Master of Public Health, and has experience of patient-medical practitioner communication research. A couple of members of the medical faculty have expressed interest in being part of such a project. Further we have contact with new Swedish company, kry.se, that provides initial consultations usingvideo-chats on mobile phones and tablets. The CEO is positive to her company being part of research projects in this area. A project based in Sweden is our current objective; this will allow us to understand the field within once context and only in Swedish, Swedish as a second or other language, and English, before adding the complexities of other contexts.
Two-day project writing workshop in Umeåat which the aims will be concretised into research questions. Invite Dr.Alison Moore, University of Wollongong to Umeå (5 nights in a hotel 1500x5= 7500, flight SYD-UME 14000, JosefinLandgård, CEO kry.se, and one of her companies general practitioners who currently hold initial consultations usingvideo-chats on mobile phones and tablets, hotel 1500 x 2 = 3 000, flight STO-UME 1500 x 2= 3 000. Lunch, Coffee, Dinner for the core group of 5 people = 4 000. We have also invited academics and practitioners from the Medical Faculty, Room for two days 1 500.
We apply for 33 000 kr.
The seed money will be placed in the Department of Language Studies.