The COVID pandemic has prompted more doctors and nurses to see their patients online, but more than 300,000 rural residents of this state lack high speed Internet. Recent budget cuts in Richmond will delay the expansion of broadband, but a team at the University of Virginia is proposing another way to make telemedicine available.
For years, UVA nursing professor Pam DeGuzman has wrestled with how to reach patients who lived far from the medical center in Charlottesville and needed follow ups after treatment.
"We definitely have patients who come from southwest Virginia which could be a 5-6 hour drive," she explains. "That’s a lot of driving particularly for someone who’s not feeling well and having fatigue."
She tried shipping iPads to patients, but the cell service didn’t always connect. Then, DeGuzman had another idea – working with local libraries.
"Every county in Virginia certainly has at least one public library including all the rural counties. They’re usually pretty centrally located," she says. " People know where they are. They all have wifi, and they all have something pretty amazing, which is a librarian. Librarians are information access specialists."
True, says Lisa Varga, executive director of the Virginia Library Association.
"We have spent a lot of time on continuing education for our librarians in this state to make sure that we are aware of the types of tools that are out there that can help assist our patrons."
They were put to the test after Christmas nearly a decade ago.
"Suddenly everyone was coming in with e-readers and saying, ‘My kids bought this for me,’ or an iPad – 'my grandkids got this for me, and I don’t know how to use it,' and it was up to us to help them," she recalls.
Varga adds that libraries are very much concerned with keeping things confidential.
"We’ve always been very aware of our patrons’ privacy and the things that they check out, the materials they’re interested in, because we don’t believe it’s anybody else’s business," she says.
And most libraries in Virginia have at least one meeting room.
"A lot of those meeting rooms cannot be used right now at the capacity that we are used to because of COVID restrictions," says Varga. "They can be re-purposed for an individual to sign up and have a private session."
UVA has been testing this approach to connecting nurses and their patients through libraries, and Professor DeGuzman says it’s been a big success.
"Patients were incredibly grateful and appreciative of the nurse reaching out to them and having this conversation with them where we assessed any distress that they had after their treatment was over."
After three years of study, she’s published some of her findings and is now working on guidelines for libraries and healthcare providers to overcome barriers and offer the benefits of telehealth.
***Editor's Note: The University of Virginia is a financial supporter of Radio IQ.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
