The potential for telemedicine in home nursing

We assessed the proportion of home nursing visits that could be replaced by home telenursing in the UK. A retrospective review of nursing notes in the UK was undertaken using an abstraction instrument developed and tested in the US. A total of 1951 episodes of patient care at home were reviewed: 1450 from Liverpool and 501 from Belfast. A total of 1626 (83%) of the episodes involved 'hands-on' interventions. In Belfast two observers estimated that 14% of home nursing visits could be done via telemedicine while in Liverpool two more observers gave an estimate of 16%. Inter-rater agreement was high (kappa = 0.93 for the Belfast observers and 0.79 for the Liverpool observers). Pilot trials of an analogue video-phone in Belfast suggested that even relatively low-quality compressed video might be useful for home nursing. These findings suggest that telemedicine may have a significant role in the delivery of home health care in the UK.