Dr Gray’s plans to be e-health centre

Dr Gray’s Hospital in the north of Scotland is aiming to set itself up as an e-health centre with a range of initiatives for remote communities.

The hospital in Elgin, Moray, has set up a range of websites containing information for patients.

It runs the highly successful website Menopause Matters which receives more than 1.7m hits per month and has followed this up with a website on breastfeeding and related topics called Babyfeeding Matters. Another site, Miscarriage Matters is being redesigned.

It is now planning a videoconferencing pilot in a remote fishing village. The pilot in Buckie aims to link new mothers with clinicians 20 miles away in Elgin, providing an interactive teaching aid that includes the Babyfeeding Matters site.

Dr Grant Cumming, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Dr Gray’s Hospital, and scientific lead for the Menopause Matters site, said: “What we see is the website and the patient.”

Dr Cumming told EHI Primary Care that the hospital wanted to become an e-health centre as part of its mission to improve health in the remote Grampian region. He added: “We’re trying to set ourselves us as an e-health centre and make the hospital sustainable.”

The hospital serves a population of about 120,000 people, spread out across remote communities and Dr Cumming said the current models of health care were unsustainable.

Babyfeeding Matters has been live since May 2007, but the team says it has significantly added to the content in the past three months as well as beginning the videoconferencing pilot.

Dr Cumming said the aim of Babyfeeding Matters was to improve breastfeeding rates – although the site also includes tips for bottle-feeding mothers as well. The site was set up with a £5,000 grant from local authorities.

Dr Heather Currie, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary in Dumfries, is an adviser to the babyfeeding site and says the team is hoping to find a more reliable source of funding,

Dr Currie is also the managing director of Menopause Matters, a website set up in 2002 which averages more than 1.7m hits per month, 40% of which come from outside the UK. The site now gets some of its funding through advertising, because it has been so successful.

Dr Currie said the site is usually among the top five UK results in Google searches on menopause and had two million hits for the first time in September.

Other e-health initiatives being pursued by the hospital include a blood pressure self-monitoring scheme in Dufftown involving 50 patients.

Early next year, the hospital plans to launch another website – Health-E-Space.com – which Dr Cumming said would be “both a conduit and an infrastructure to deliver holistic care to the Moray area of Scotland under the self-care agenda.”

The site will enable patients to keep their own health journals online and share them with those they give permission to. A further website aims to provide information on urinary incontinence, an issue Dr Cumming said some women were too embarrassed to talk to their doctors about.