PAC Web
A Doctor On-Line?
Fiji’s award-winning School of Medicine is reaching out across the Pacific via the Internet.
A patient on a remote island sustains severe internal injuries from a fall. The resident doctor wants to consult other specialists before resuming any work on the patient. The island may be geographically isolated, but an operational Web site linked to a coordinating hub could connect the specialist with the doctor in the field.
The Fiji School of Medicine, the major regional medical institution located in Suva, aims to expand its existing Web site (www.fsm.ac.fj) to include a tele-medicine network. The new Web site is expected to be on-line in August. It would allow consultations and render health information to providers who may be geographically disadvantaged. Thanks to a $US100,000 award from mobile telephone supplier Ericsson, the Fiji School of Medicine will be able to improve medical-related communication links between Pacific Islands countries.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
The funds are part of Ericsson’s Internet Community Award (ERICA). Awardees are selected from non-profit organisations that have projects involving technology as a community development tool. The other four ERICA 2000 recipients are: Pathways Community Network (USA), National Down Syndrome Society (USA), The Gould League (Australia) and Rhodes University Mathematics Education Project (South Africa).
 |
|
|
The Fiji School of Medicine’s current Web site provides general information about the school.
Dr. Wame Baravilala, the school’s dean, says: “The money for this development will allow us to develop another Web site with a one-stop shop concept. It would help professionals throughout Fiji and other Pacific Islands countries when they want to access health information, seek a consultation-clinical or public health consultation, or even log on for formal or informal continued education.
“Once they’ve logged on, we’ll provide the links and hopefully have a lot of material here at Fiji School of Medicine. We’ll also have a triaging service. When we receive a request from (a medical specialist regarding a patient), we’ll have a team here who will fuel the request and pass it on to the appropriate specialists in Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada and even England if none are found in Fiji or within the Fiji School of Medicine.”
However, the Web site will be developed more for the region, says Baravilala. “We have 7.4 million people living in an area of 32 million square kilometres; that’s if you include Papua New Guinea. They’ll be most welcome to log on to the site, but I suppose since Australia looks after them they will develop in their own way.”
The proposed Fiji School of Medicine-based on-line network, which hopes to bring together all health professional groups, targets the smaller islands countries in the Pacific region from the Solomon Islands across to the eastern Pacific.
The Fiji School of Medicine Web site hopes to emulate and expand on a Web network operating in the northern Pacific. Fiji School of Medicine research co-ordinator Dr. Jan Pryor explains: “There’s a regional medical association in the North Pacific called the Pacific Basin Medical Association (PBMA), which have an initiative called the Western Pacific Health Net.
“It’s designed to promote distance education and distance consultation. It’s a consortium of many different entities, which includes the governments of the United States-associated Pacific Islands plus a lot of resource entities. But the main resource player has been the Honolulu-based Tripler Army Medical Center.”
Adds Pryor: “What we (FSM) would like to do is emulate to a certain extent that model, but extend it so it can field requests from different islands and that we can triage taking the information and be able to route it to a pool of specialists around the Pacific.”
An upshot of the on-line consultation is that it would give the remote health care providers sufficient information to prevent unnecessary procedures or even unnecessary referrals.
