FEATURE TECHNOLOGY
Occupatio
a di
With an international pandemic
visits and consultations has n
Jennifer Read describe thei
to implement home visi
The relevance of video conferencing
technology for visits and consultation
been steadily growing. Studies sugg
they are safe, shorter than a face-tocontact
and popular with some patients and st
compared with face-to-face consultations for s
conditions (Greenhalgh et al 2018).
The NHS Long-Term Plan sets out a roadma
go ‘mainstream’ with digitally enabled health ca
including online consultations. Empowering peo
using digital technology instead of face-to-face
for appointments is advocated, suggesting that
consultations can avoid unnecessary travel, sup
productive use of time, increase clinical capacit
therefore create efficiencies (NHS England 2019
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pande
the demand for video conferencing to facilitate
consultations has never been greater. Both the
and social care organisations are implementing
solutions to conduct online tele-mentoring, mee
and clinic consultations.
A digital approach
The Virtual Visit Approach (ViVA) was conceived
a group of occupational therapists, thinking abo
they could become more research active, deve
a collaboration with the University of Sheffield c
‘Collaboration Aiming to Build OT Research’ (C
(Jones 2016).
Occupational therapists explained that hom
visits were occasionally challenging, due to reso
required, geographical location and organisatio
challenges. An application already developed fo
emergency response services in Italy (Mazumd
al 2017) was available to test in a scenario whe
occupational therapist was unable to undertake
visit, but a relative or trusted visitor could acces
property.
ViVA works by allowing a hospital based occ
therapist to communicate with a home location
capturing images, videos and writing a report in
time. The hospital-based occupational therapis
28 OTnews June 2020