Virtual Care and Telehealth

Virtual care, sometimes called Telehealth or remote healthcare, means you can get healthcare where you live. It lets you get safe, good-quality care at home by using secure online tools.

Virtual Care and Telehealth Programme

Virtual Care and Telehealth services include:

• video health appointments
• checking your health from home
• virtual wards
• online support and therapies

These services help you get better at home, stay in touch with your care team, and spend less time in hospital. Virtual health is an important part of our plan to bring care closer to home.

Virtual wards

A virtual ward means you can get hospital-level care while staying at home. Hospital teams use digital tools to check on you remotely. You can rest in familiar surroundings and still stay closely linked to your care team.

The first virtual wards focus on lung and heart care. Other areas of care will be added soon.

The hospitals that are using virtual wards are:

• University Hospital Limerick
• St Vincent’s University Hospital

Video-enabled care

Our Video-enabled care (VEC) system is called Attend Anywhere. It is used by many of our services.

These include:

• hospitals
• community services
• mental health services
• physiotherapy
• dietetics
• speech and language

These appointments let you meet your healthcare team online instead of going to meet in-person. This makes it easier to access care and saves on travel time.

Remote health monitoring

If you live with a long-term condition, you might be given a monitoring kit to help check your health at home. You then use simple online tools to log things like your blood pressure or oxygen levels. These are sent safely to your care team.

If anything changes, the team can step in early to help. This helps you stay well, avoid hospital visits, and look after your own health.

Online supports and therapies

More online services are becoming available through the HSE.

These include:

• digital therapies
• mental health supports
• online sessions with physiotherapists, dietitians and other professionals

These services give you flexible ways to get help at times that work best for you.

How virtual health is being developed

Our Telehealth Programme is working with patients and staff to create safe and dependable digital health services. It follows the Telehealth Roadmap 2024-2027.

The programme is built on strong leadership, good planning, the right technology. It also focuses on training staff to use the new technology.

A national Telehealth Steering Committee makes sure that hospitals and community services work together.

Working together

The Telehealth Programme brings many groups together.

These include:

• clinical and digital teams in hospitals and community care
• regional health teams
• acute digital teams
• nurses, midwives and medical information officers
• digital transformation and national digital health offices
• service users and technology partners

We work together to design and deliver virtual health services.

Each service is tested in real life settings, improved with feedback, and then used more widely. This helps virtual health become a strong, patient-focused part of everyday care.