Andreas KOCH, University of Salzburg, Austria
eHealth technologies strengthen geographically remote and sparsely populated regions (Dubois & Carson 2016). With their capacity to decentralize the supply of health services, they promote opportunities to enhance the local autonomy of residents and health care institutions. Concerning residents, they do so by preserving a health care infrastructure in regions, which have to struggle with a decline of tangible (on-site) social services infrastructures due to demographic ageing and/or shrinkage. Inhabitants feel more secure if they can rely on health services in their vicinity instead of travelling to the next hospital far away from home. For health care institutions, eHealth technologies support the economic survival of small hospitals as regional nodes in a trans-regional, national network. These hospitals function as regional hubs equipped with on-site and virtual medical facilities.
This theoretical approach is applied to an empirical case study of the northern Swedish municipality of Storuman, a remotely located and sparsely populated region with approx. 6.000 inhabitants living in an area of 8.300 km2. The hospital of Storuman established, with support of the provincial government of Västerbotten and an international network of health care institutions, a regional network of Virtual Health Rooms (VHR), which ensure a basic (tele-)medical infrastructure in small villages within and across the municipality (Berggren 2016). The first VHR was inaugurated in the village of Slussfors (120 inhabitants) in 2014, and another two are in the phase of conversion. Easy-to-use blood tests or teleconferencing services with practitioners in Storuman are available, supplemented with activities of local caring staff recruited from the local population (e.g., retired nurses).
Mots clés : spatial decentralization|sustainable health care|virtual health rooms|northern Sweden
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