The Director for National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Global Health Research Centres West Africa, Professor Irene Agyepong, is advocating 'telemedicine' in rural communities to improve medical care for people.
She stated that, telemedicine in rural areas would aid nurses fast communicate with highly trained doctors at the district hospital to report cases and get prescriptions for paramedics in critical conditions.
According to her, non-communicable diseases were becoming prevalent in low and middle income countries, and people in rural areas needed to travel distances to hospital to be diagnosed and receive treatment. "Some of the medicines used to treat hypertension, diabetes, needed to be prescribed by a highly trained physician or doctor, and we do not have enough of such healthcare providers in our Community-Based Health Planning and Services that dominate in our rural communities, so if people in these communities need to be diagnosed, they have to travel, cross rivers to get to the nearest hospital to do so." "If there is telemedicine, where nurses in CHPS compounds can just pick a phone and call a doctor at the district level to get prescriptions for these patients it would be a good initiative," she noted.
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