Virtual Home Visits for Stroke Patients and Their Caregivers

Overview

The primary aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual home care for stroke patients and their caregivers. The secondary purpose is to evaluate the usability of the application by developing a mobile application for use in virtual home visits. The study will be carried out using the mixed research model, in which quantitative and qualitative methods are used together. The population of the research will consist of patients and caregivers with the diagnosis of hemorrhage, infarction, cerebrovascular accident and cerebral infarction, who applied to the Antalya Provincial Health Directorate Antalya Training and Research Hospital Home Health Unit, where the study is planned to be conducted. The sample of the study will consist of stroke patients and caregivers who meet the criteria for inclusion in the study. The first phase of the study was designed as a parallel group, single center and single blind randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual home visits in terms of time, cost and caregiver competence. The experimental group was the patient/patient relative group who made a virtual home visit, the control group will consist of 48 patients/patient relatives who have been visited face-to-face. In the second phase of the study, semi-structured interview method will be used to determine the views of patients/patient relatives about virtual home visits. In order to evaluate the usability of the developed application, a usability survey will be applied to the group that has visited the virtual home. With the results of this study, telemedicine applications in home care services will help to increase accessibility to home care services and reduce health care costs.considered to contribute. At the same time, it is expected that the results of the study will contribute to the scientific literature in the field of design and application of telemedicine services, which are developing and spreading

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in our country, with 22.2%. In addition, stroke, the most common disease diagnosis, has a prevalence of 35%. Treatment of this disease begins in the hospital and continues at home. Treatment and spread over many years. There are barriers due to reasons such as the inability of stroke patients to come to the outpatient clinic, bed dependency, old age, and living outside the central district due to the lack of advanced specialist areas related to stroke in the center and big cities. In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic has made it difficult for the stroke patient to benefit from home health care. In our country, home care services are generally for conical diseases. One of the chronic diseases in the first three of these is stroke patients, whose medical diagnosis is called cerebrovascular disease. Stroke patients constitute an important part of home care services. Remote healthcare provides many advantages to healthcare professionals and patients with chronic disease diagnosis. Some of these advantages are; TÜSEB Home Health Services Report (2021) states that virtual home visits are used to reduce the risk of transmission of Covid-19 disease during the pandemic. In addition to the many advantages of remote health services, problems such as users' readiness, usability, technology literacy, attitudes, internet access while using remote health services still continue today.