It’s been deadline city at The Splendid Word this month and we’re enjoying a (mostly) keyboard-free weekend to rest, restore and reconnect.
We’ve been copy-writing for some pretty cool regional and city-based websites, interviewing a stack of young dairy farmers for a series of features coming up in The Weekly Times, script-writing a bunch of health-related vignettes and television commercials, pumping out press releases for local government and not-for-profits, annual report writing for large business, speech writing, proof-reading and editing, editing, editing (any excuse to wield the almighty red pen).
We were especially chuffed to land an exciting collaborative gig this week working with Echuca Regional Health and Melbourne’s Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health on an exciting initiative that is changing the face of stroke management in rural and regional Victoria.
The Victorian Stroke Telemedicine project, which is being piloted at ERH, provides country-based stroke patients with increased access to the clot-busting medication thrombolysis.
Until now, country emergency departments have been restricted in administering the life-saving treatment as it requires detailed assessment to ensure a patient qualifies for its use.
Put plainly, without telemedicine, if you were to be treated for a stroke in a rural hospital, you would only be likely to get this clot-busting therapy half as often as you would if you went to a city hospital.
Through this new program, neurologists in Melbourne are now linked to mobile ‘telemedicine carts’ in rural emergency departments, giving high-quality audiovisual connection.
Telemedicine is providing a life-saving link between an emergency doctor in a rural or regional hospital and a neurologist in Melbourne (cool huh!).
Federal Health Minister Peter Dutton launched the $9 million Victorian Stroke Telemedicine Project in Melbourne on Thursday and we had a lot of fun putting together this short video-clip to be used as a showcase at the launch. Special thanks to George Santos for his exceptional audiovisual work on this neat little collaboration.
Oh how we love the enormous variety, the colour and the human-interest aspect of the work that crosses our path on a daily basis. And the fact that we get to do it all here in beautiful EM is kinda mind-blowing.
https://www.vst.org.au/news-post/a-stroke-survivors-story/
X Lee for TSW
