Almost three hundred people have avoided the Emergency Department at Cork University Hospital following the roll out of a new pilot virtual care service.
The service allows GPs and paramedics to speak with an Emergency consultant and Geriatrics consultant by phone and video call from 10am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.
The Urgent Virtual Care service has dealt with over 530 referrals in the past month and has helped almost 70 per cent to avoid the Emergency Department.
Professor Conor Deasy is an emergency medicine consultant at Cork University Hospital:
"The numbers attending the Emergency Department are up at 80,000 this year. In 2010, it was 50,00. This is an effort at trying to put some order on the inevitable chaos that can be created when you have lots of people coming in, in an unscheduled way, for urgent conditions that could be dealt with through a scheduling process.”
