The Telehealth Programme is the latest addition to the TEC Cymru portfolio. It brings exciting opportunities to develop the use of equipment, monitoring and response to bring care closer to home. It will support the implementation of the tools health and social care need to deliver patient centric care, providing individuals with more choice and greater flexibility about how and where they manage their health and well-being. Due to its infancy, it’s important that the Programme listens and hears from everyone involved, carers to clinicians.
The team is led by Programme Manager Michelle Cook, who brings a wealth of experience working on Digital transformation across health for almost 15 years and recently appointed Sana Ahmed Project Manager, who is joining TEC Cymru following successful digital rollouts within our Local Health Boards.
Since creating the newly established team, the Programme has concluded a Discovery Phase, which was rooted in learning. One of the first hurdles has been to overcome the uncertainty around the terminology used, with Telehealth technology interchangeably referred to by multiple terms including remote monitoring and virtual wards and is aligning itself with strategic partners who are already working to standardise terminology and eradicate this confusion.
The Programme has been energised by the numerous examples shown across the Four Nations, notably NHS Scotland’s Connect Me and NHS England’s Virtual Wards rollouts. TEC Cymru will continue to learn from their approaches on how to effectively tackle embedding digital enablers into existing models of care to maintain the highest standards. In addition to these inspiring transformation Programmes, the team has learnt a lot from undertaking Market Analysis, which saw them combing through the marketplace to understand and learn about credible products, their current partnerships, usage, and potential applications for Wales.
All this learning has reshaped our thinking and supported initial engagements across Health and Social Care and as a Programme we have a responsibility to keep the discussion going. A key principle being to connect, build and maintain collaboration and co-operation that bridges organisational and care setting boundaries. The Programme has a role to promote and demonstrate the benefits that telehealth services can bring.
We know that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented acceleration to deploy alternative models of care with Video Consultations quickly becoming the norm. Therefore, the Programme is keen to hear from as many services and voices as they can who are already leading the charge and embracing elements of Telehealth, whether that is using remote monitoring devices or delivering a virtual MDT.
Please reach out to the team so that we can continue learning from your experiences and driving forward a Programme shaped by you, for you:
Michelle Cook, Programme Manager: michelle.cook3@wales.nhs.uk
Sana Ahmed, Project Manager: sana.ahmed@wales.nhs.uk