Telehealth knowledge expands globally with RFW and Sydney University

Telehealth services hold so much promise to address some of the most difficult health system problems, including barriers to service access for rural and remote communities – particularly for children. However, telehealth continues to face major challenges to being embedded into existing work flows, sustainability and expansion.

Telehealth supports children's learning and development — Telehealth supports children’s learning and development

Royal Far West has been working with Professor Alexandra Martiniuk (NHMRC TRIP Fellow) and Dr Seye Abimbola (co-investigator University of Sydney Industry Partnerships Grant and NHMRC Early Career Fellow) from The University of Sydney, on program of research to increase understanding and share lessons nationally and globally, about how to grow and sustain telehealth programs, like the RFW Telecare for Kids program.

We are proud to have co-authored the below published journal article with our University of Sydney partners. The article describes how the process of collaboratively co-designing an evidence-based logic model for the RFW Telecare for Kids program helped to build understanding across the organisation, and embed the program into our existing services for children.

By publishing our experience and learnings from this process in DIGITAL HEALTH, a peer-reviewed open access journal we hope we can help to push forward knowledge and practice in this space to ensure that programs, like RFW Telecare for Kids, can grow and sustain nationally and globally – supporting progress towards health for all.

Read the full article On the same page: Co-designing the logic model of a telehealth service for children in rural and remote Australia

Abimbola, S., Li, C., Mitchell, M., Everett, M., Casburn, K., Crooks, P., Hammond, R., Milling, H,. Ling, L., Reilly, A., Crawford, A., Cane, L., Hopp, D., Stolp, E., Davies, S., Martiniuk, A. (2019). On the same page: Co-designing the logic model of a telehealth service for children in rural and remote Australia. DIGITAL HEALTH.

*Note: this body of work was co-funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) TRIP Fellowship (Martiniuk); a University of Sydney Industry Engagement Commercial Development and Industry Partnerships (CDIP) Grant (Martiniuk, Abimbola) and NHMRC Early Career Fellowship (Abimbola), as well as RFW in-kind support to help translate this research into practice.

Keep an eye out for many more of our partnered publications arising from this work.