Monash Children’s brings specialist paediatric services to Gippsland

Gippsland families will benefit from an initiative bringing specialist care closer to home for the region’s youngest patients.

The Monash Children’s Telehealth program will help with medical education and patient management in regional Victoria, including Gippsland.

Monash Children’s Medical Director Professor Nick Freezer said the program would improve access for paediatric patients in the Gippsland area to specialised medical care, through video conferencing with Gippsland health services and GPs.

‘This will allow us to provide high-quality specialist care and multidisciplinary consultations for patients and their families who are unable or have difficulty travelling to Melbourne,’ Professor Freezer said.

‘It will also allow doctors in Gippsland to access specialist care for their patients without the need for the patients to travel to Melbourne.’

Benefits of this new initiative include:

• Education of medical and allied health staff in regional and rural Victoria;

• Reduced waiting and travel time for children and families awaiting diagnosis or treatment options;

• Improved access for patients where the traditional delivery of health services is affected by distance and lack of local specialist clinicians to deliver services;

• Improved access to medical information leading to an increase in efficiency for case managers and surgeons making decisions about patient care;

• A new paradigm in healthcare, where the patient is monitored between visits to the Monash Children’s to significantly reduce hospitalisations and visits to the emergency department, while improving patients’ quality of life.

For the past 15 years, multidisciplinary teams from Monash Children’s have visited Gippsland to provide outreach specialist medical services near the patient’s home.

These paediatric clinics involved rehabilitation, surgery, respiratory medicine (cystic fibrosis), neurology, diabetes and endocrinology, gastroenterology and cardiology.

For logistical reasons, these were only undertaken two to four times a year.

The Telehealth program is now under way.