'Telehealth is patient empowerment in action'

Cathy Gillespie leads a telehealth service that has helped thousands of patients manage heart failure, diabetes and COPD in their own home

As a senior nurse with many years of experience, mostly in general practice, Cathy Gillespie admits to having been a bit sceptical about telehealth at first.

Surely the essence of nursing is being face-to-face with your patient, not sitting in an office perhaps many miles away? And how would patients – many of them elderly and vulnerable – cope with the demands of new technology? ‘I didn’t really see how it could work,’ she says. ‘I didn’t learn that until I came into the job.’

Now, as the team leader in telehealth at Liverpool Community Health, Ms Gillespie is an enthusiastic convert. ‘People talk a lot about