Northern Health is expanding the access to its virtual emergency department service to people living in residential aged care facilities and COVID-19 patients being treated at home via the COVID-19 Positive Pathway Program.

This comes as part of the additional A$162 million ($122 million) funding provided by the state government of Victoria to the health service to improve the operations of Ambulance Victoria.

Due to this, the capacity of the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department (VVED) will be doubled from 250 patients per day. The service virtually connects patients with non-life-threatening emergencies to nurses and doctors via video call. It also enables paramedics to connect patients on scene for virtual assessment, management and referral.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

The additional funding for the VVED is part of the Victorian government's initiative to support the state health workers and patients amid a fresh outbreak caused by the emergence of new COVID-19 variants. 

This week, COVID-19 cases in Victoria went above 10,000 with nearly 900 people hospitalised. The state health department reported seeing a 99% increase in COVID-19 patients in hospitals this month compared in late June.

"We’ll have more paramedics working alongside our nurses and doctors, to get more support to Victorians who can be treated in their home, [p]lus the tools to get patients the best care in the right place if they need to go to the hospital," said Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews.

THE LARGER TREND

In late-May, Northern Health deployed The Clinician's ZEDOC platform to replace the old patient intake platform at its VVED. The new platform has been configured to simplify the virtual ED's digital patient intake and clinical tracking processes. Since its implementation, the ZEDOC platform has helped manage the increase in patient flow in the VVED, which was recently expanded across Victoria.