Past Projects

Rural Well Being - www.ruralwellbeing.org.uk

In 2005 IRH redeveloped, updated, and relaunched the Rural Well Being website (www.ruralwellbeing.org.uk).

Rural Well Being is a bilingual (English/Welsh) health and well being information website for people in rural Wales. The site provides a wealth of good quality, reliable information on a range of health and wellbeing issues and signposts people to organisations and health services in their area that may be able to provide additional information or advice.

The original Rural Well Being website, which attracted up to 200,000 hits a month, was jointly created in 2001 by the IRH and the Powys and Ceredigion Health Promotion Unit with match funding from the European-funded Llwybwr: Pathway Initiative.

The project to update the website and make it more relevant, interactive, and easier to use, was funded by the Wales Council for Voluntary Action’s Rural Stress Grants Scheme.

The new website contains colourful cartoon graphics and up-to-date information on a wide range of health and well being issues. Topics covered include stress, drugs, depression, alcohol, contraception, sexually transmitted infections, smoking, pregnancy, healthy eating, sexuality, self-harm, bullying, rape, and travel health.

The site also contains interactive quizzes relating to drugs and alcohol, the sun and its effects on your skin and users’ knowledge of how to stay safe between the sheets. There’s also a body mass index calculator, a calculator which totals up the cost of a lifetime’s cigarettes and a game that reveals the calorie content of different alcoholic drinks.

The website is connected to a searchable database containing contact details for approximately 1,500 agencies across rural Wales as well as national organisations that offer further information or help on a particular issue. The database also includes details for all doctors, dentists, hospitals, pharmacies, and opticians in rural Wales.

Virtual Outreach

The Virtual Outreach project (a Health Technology Assessment project) was a randomised control trial to evaluate the delivery of outpatient consultations using video telephony. The Royal Free Hospital was the lead partner, and ran the urban element of the project, and the Centre for Health Informatics project managed the rural part, which was based at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and in rural practices in Shropshire and Powys. Dr John Wynn-Jones, at the IRH, was the Clinical Director for the rural part.

The project used video telephony to link the patient, who was with their GP, to the consultant in the hospital clinic for an outpatient appointment. Using the technology in this way had the convenience of outreach clinic without the patient having to travel. Furthermore there is good evidence that joint medical consultations (where the GP and consultant review patients together) can lead to a substantial reduction in subsequent hospital appointments and further health service usage. If the trend towards fewer hospitals continues teleconferenced outpatient appointments could be important in delivering services to the more remote areas and the need for a full evaluation of the service is essential.

TEAM project

The Tele Education and Medicine - TEAM - took place in rural mid Wales in the early 1990s. The project investigated the use of video conferencing for education sessions for distant rural practitioners and for outpatient consultations with a remote consultant.

The education sessions linked together 6 practices with a distant consultant who was responsible for the session. Practices normally had preparation to do in advance of the session, which were held during a lunch time thus enabling a number of members of the primary care team to join in. The sessions were well received and are now being revived (see below). The video conferencing equipment has become more sophisticated but easier to use and a project to encourage the uptake of such technology is also being started.

The project was managed by the Centre for Health Informatics at the University of Wales Swansea.

home | about | contact | research & projects | education & training | policy | news | membership | publications | library | e-health | rural health links