How do you reflect on the contribution you and your colleagues have made throughout the pandemic?
I think a huge, diverse group of people across the hospital and the University have worked amazingly well together to deal with this ever-changing situation, and come up with new and innovative ways to do the best we could when things were shockingly busy and crazy and sad in the hospital system.
How did the partnership with IHealthE and TCC-COVID come about?
In March last year, my Head of Department, Associate Professor Jeffrey Post was walking through the corridors when Sze-Yuan Ooi approached him and said: 'Let us know what we can do to help'. Jeff’s answer was: 'We need an app. Speak to Kristen; she'll need an app.'. That’s how I met Sze-Yuan and Nigel and the whole TCC team. They dropped everything they were working on to create the TCC-COVID app, built around the questions I wanted and the parameters I needed. At our peak, we had over a thousand patients with COVID-19 in the district and I just didn't have enough staff to call them every day. The app meant we could manage patients at scale and really focus on those who were in need of medical care.
What do you think will be the ongoing role of TCC-COVID?
Now that people are vaccinated, we have lots of low to moderate risk patients who really don't need that much intervention. They just need to feel supported, and to have a mechanism they can use to reach out for care. The app has a button that says, 'I'm feeling worse' and if they press that, someone will call them within 30 minutes. I have never before worked with a cohort of patients in the community who were so anxious. Just being able to reassure them that they were safe was so, so helpful.