Telehealth is the delivery of health care at a distance using video consulting along with other technology for rural patients. It enables an equity of access to paediatric specialist care for rural patients compared with urban patients. It avoids the time, cost, inconvenience and risk of extensive travel to a metropolitan site for consultation. It can bring everyone involved together for the consultation, eg having the consult at the school with the child’s teacher, or allowing both parents to attend if not at the same site. Paediatric telehealth has been extensively evaluated with over 20,000 consultations over a 16 year period by University of Queensland’s (UQ) Centre for Online Health (https://coh.centre.uq.edu.au/service-area/queensland- telepaediatric-service).

QPTS is a private medical service providing medical consultation via telehealth with occasional outreach visits to some rural sites. The QPTS office with administrative support is at the Brisbane based Spring Hill endocrinology group – for referrals, bookings, billings and enquires. The video platform is provided by Healthdirect Video Call, a web-based platform, for use on everyday devices with good internet connections, anywhere. QPTS were the first to use the Videocall platform for private practice in Australia. Device requirements can be checked at Technical requirements for Video Call - Healthdirect Australia. Patients attend appointments via the QPTS website and wait in their own private room, in the waiting area, before meeting the doctor.

Consultation is available to babies, children and adolescents living in rural Queensland aged up to 18 years of age who are referred by their family doctor. Patients will need to have signed a consent, billing and privacy statement prior to consultation.