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Aged Care Telehealth Project | 13SICK

Aged Care Telehealth Australia

13SICK is an After Hours Deputising Service that provides Bulk Billed home visits and telehealth with patients across Australia.

One of the Directors of the service, Dr Jonathan Brown, is leading an Aged Care Teleheath program at 13SICK to improve patient access to a Doctor when the regular GP is unavailable.

Aged Care Facilities in Australia

Data from 2023 shows that Australia has 2639 Aged Care facilities. 63% of these facilities are in Metropolitan (MM1) areas and 37% are in Regional, Rural and Remote areas1

Aged Care Facilities, on average, contain 84 residents and often there is only one RN looking after these patients overnight

Accessing a Doctor After Hours – The Problem

Jonathan has met with over 30 Aged Care Facilities in recent months to understand the problems that patients and staff were having in trying to access a Doctor in the After Hours period. Feedback from staff included:

  • It was often difficult to get through to a GP overnight and wait times could be long for services such as Virtual ED.
  • Patients often needed to have medications charted on prescribing platforms (BestMed, Medimap) which Virtual ED wasn’t able to provide
  • Aged Care Facilities in rural and remote areas may have to rely on the Local Hospital or Ambulance service for After Hours care

Aged Care Telehealth – Our Aims

The aims of our Aged Care Telehealth project are:

  1. To be able to provide access to a Doctor promptly overnight and on the weekends
  2. Reduce strain on the local hospitals
  3. Reduce un-necessary admissions to hospital
  4. To ease the load on the Ambulance Service

How 13SICK can help

13SICK can provide Bulk Billed Aged Care Telehealth services to patients when the RN can’t get hold of their regular GP or the patient needs urgent medical attention.

We have a team of Doctors online throughout the night and over the weekend to provide prompt consultations. Our Doctors have access to medical prescribing platforms so we can chart meds on BestMed, Medimap and other platforms when required

Get in touch with us

Please get in touch with our team if you’d like to find out more – click on the button below, fill in your details and we’ll call you back 👇

References: 1. https://www.gen-agedcaredata.gov.au/topics/providers,-services-and-places-in-aged-care