Telstra Health and Gold Coast Health: delivering virtual care

LUCY SYMONS - JONES

TITLE: NET ZERO DIRECTOR

COMPANY: LEXICA

Founded in 2013, Telstra Health works to improve lives by delivering digitally-enabled care to its communities by providing software products, solutions and platforms to governments and healthcare providers throughout Australia.

LOCATION: LONDON can monitor patients’ blood pressure, pulse oximetry, temperature and weight remotely. These baseline metrics are then combined with a virtual appointment in which the clinician can follow-up with the patient to discuss and provide results.

In her role as Director of Net Zero at Lexica, Symons-Jones integrates sustainability through Lexica’s services. She drives the Net Zero team to work on practical, achievable sustainability programmes and strategies for their clients.

Supporting the healthcare sector in the push to Net Zero

Telstra Health was chosen as a key partner of Gold Coast Health Services, providing their virtual health consultation platform as a way to deliver patient care remotely. “Traditionally, you might go to see a specialist at a hospital and, after a five minute conversation, be sent home,” Jamie Spencer, Regional General Manager Business Development at Telstra Health says. “Someone living in rural Queensland might drive for up to four to six hours for that five minute appointment. Now, rather than people having to make those long journeys to see a specialist, we can provide that consultation to people in their own homes, in a way that leads to a richer conversation, which results in better feedback and, ultimately, a better standard of care.”

Lexica is a specialist health and life sciences consultancy of more than 100 experts – and it’s still growing. The company supports international health and life sciences organisations with the planning, delivery, and continuous improvement of their services to secure immediate and long-lasting results. Lucy Symons-Jones is the esteemed Net Zero Director at Lexica.

Telstra Health’s virtual care technology adopts a twofold approach. First, using Bluetooth connected devices, clinicians

“We offer the full spectrum of healthcare planning from our team of experts, handpicked from the fields of architecture, clinical, finance, health services operational management, and informatics,” explains Symons-Jones.

“We’ve found that our service has helped to dramatically reduce readmission rates, and enabled early discharge, which means that patients get to be at home sooner,” enthuses Spencer, who also notes that, “The overarching monitoring aspect can also help people who need readmission get back into hospital sooner, which can make a huge difference in some cases.”

Lexica is also a founding member of the UK Healthcare Planning Academy, an initiative established to share knowledge and best practice across the field, to raise the professional profile of healthcare planning, and to encourage and develop talent in the sector.

With a professional background in public policy and external affairs, Symons-Jones has always been committed to advocating for energy policy reform, expanding worldwide access to energy and championing the development and implementation of green energy solutions.

Spencer, who works closely with Sandip Kumar, Gold Coast Health’s Executive Director of Transformation and Digital, emphasises that the relationship between Telstra Health and Gold Coast is far more than that of vendor and client. “We’re looking for a real partner, not just a customer.”

“Under my role as Director of Net Zero at Lexica, I work to embed and integrate sustainability thinking across all Lexica services. I drive the department to meet the urgent political and social agenda and the push to net carbon zero,” she says. “Our Net Zero team creates ambitious yet practical and achievable sustainability programmes and strategies for our clients to deliver value to them, to society and to the environment. Our work is always robust, leading-edge and technically assured.

“We also host three free-to-access frameworks that can accelerate the delivery of net-zero ambitions while delivering

Action

excellent service, quality and value. In running these frameworks, we actioned approximately £40m in clean tech transactions for completed projects in the last few years.”

The climate crisis is a health emergency

Lexica partnered with climate intelligence company Cervest to screen and analyse the climate exposure of critical infrastructure assets such as hospitals, medical clinics and other healthcare facilities across the UK.

“Our team of consultants will use Cervest’s climate intelligence product EarthScan™ to accurately assess climate risk exposure, right down to the individual asset.

We chose EarthScan because it provides a comprehensive view of asset-level climate risk, allowing us to look back to 1970 and ahead to 2100 and access insights into both acute and chronic risks – including flooding, heat stress, wildfire, precipitation, wind and drought – across multiple climate emissions scenarios. We will use these insights to baseline, monitor and forecast climate risk as well as develop strategic, operational and financial plans for our healthcare clients and their assets.”

Extreme weather has increased pressure on health services still grappling with COVID-19 and the various backlogs it amassed.

The healthcare sector is at a high risk of climate-driven natural hazards that can have serious, long-lasting implications, including the immediate effects on staff wellbeing and numbers of patients, as Symons-Jones highlights.

“Health services will also have to grapple with a rise in mortality rates and poorer patient recovery from illness, in addition to medical staff struggling to work in overheated conditions or an increase in staff absenteeism due to illness, school closures or caring for relatives during extreme weather events.

“The IPCC’s sixth assessment report showed that climate change will significantly increase ill health and premature deaths in the near-to long-term future.”

Extreme weather puts pressure on the infrastructure of health services

But it isn’t just the human side of healthcare that will suffer; the base infrastructure will also be impacted by severe weather.

The healthcare sector is at high risk of climate-driven natural hazards which can have serious impacts from flooded boiler rooms to leaky roofs.

“The heatwaves of summer 2022 brought climate adaptation to the forefront of our minds. Many trusts were forced to cancel appointments due to IT systems failures and overheated AHUs and cooling systems.”

“As it stands, Britain’s critical national infrastructure for providing healthcare is not built to withstand forecasted changes in climate. We can expect the increasing frequency and severity of risks like heatwaves and drought to lead to healthcare assets and infrastructure having to be retrofitted or even relocated.”

According to Symons-Jones, the healthcare industry has the opportunity to lead the rest of the world in becoming more resilient in the face of climate change.

“One of the most exciting opportunities is that the healthcare service, given its scale and size, can be a testing ground for the clean tech industries of the future.”

Whether thinking about new ways of generating electricity or different ways of heating buildings, putting new technologies to work in the healthcare sector is a very exciting source of progress.