Page 14 - Care-for-vulnerable-populations-during-COVID-19-pandemic

3. MINIMISE CLOSE CONVERSATION (FACE-

TO-FACE CONVERSATIONS) HANDLING BY
HEALTH CARE PROVIDER

I've mentioned booking and history taking through the phone can reduce the time and contact of
the patient (face-to-face). Now, we also empower the parents or carers of our child health
patients who come for immunization; empowering them to self-perform procedures like
measuring the height, weight and length of their children. Our nurses have to be there to
supervise and the nurse should plot it in the chart (not the parents). All these have to be done
without compromising the quality of care. We also have online monitoring of antenatal and
postnatal patients. We have checklists for patients that we need to go through to check/to monitor
them. The checklist, which has been developed and the nurses go through this checklist to ask
certain questions through the phone.
Virtual clinic. This is another exciting thing that has actually happened at our clinic in
Putrajaya Persint 18. We have started off virtual clinics as a proof-of-concept pilot project. We
started off in August 2019, with only a few NCD patients where the patients do not need to come
to the clinic physically, but can be seen virtually. For example, patients being started on ACE
Inhibitors, and we have taken the renal profile, and we asked them to come back in two weeks’
time to review the blood results. So it can actually reduce congestion in the clinics by having less
patients. So this is what we have done virtually. When COVID-19 happened, we took the
opportunity to expand our virtual Clinic to include other cases as well.