The buck stops here: midwives and maternity care in rural Scotland.

Objective: To explore and understand what it means to provide midwifery care in remote and rural Scotland.

Design: Qualitative interviews with 72 staff from 10 maternity units, analysed via a case study approach.

Setting: Remote and rural areas of Scotland.

The introduction of a new consulting technology into the National Health Service (NHS) for Scotland.

New technologies can change healthcare delivery. Cisco HealthPresence, an integrated platform that combines video, audio, and call center technology with medical information to create a virtual clinic experience, was piloted on emergency department patients. The aim was to assess primary care consultations.

Midwives' competence: is it affected by working in a rural location?

Introduction: Rising health care costs and the need to consolidate expertise in tertiary services have led to the centralisation of services. In the UK, the result has been that many rural maternity units have become midwife-led. A key consideration is that midwives have the skills to competently and confidently provide maternity services in rural areas, which may be geographically isolated and where the midwife may only see a small number of pregnant women each year.

Competencies and skills for remote and rural maternity care: a review of the literature.

Aim: This paper reports a review of the literature on skills, competencies and continuing professional development necessary for sustainable remote and rural maternity care.

Background: There is a general sense that maternity care providers in rural areas need specific skills and competencies. However, how these differ from generic skills and competencies is often unclear.

A qualitative study of the attitudes of patients and staff to the use of mobile phone technology for recording and gathering asthma data.

Linking mobile phone technology with electronic data collection may facilitate the research experience and improve compliance. We conducted a qualitative interview study using a purposeful sample of 10 patients with asthma and two research staff. Patient diary information was collected twice a day using an electronic peak flow meter linked to a mobile phone with an interactive screen to record current asthma symptoms transmitted to, and stored in, a server.

Treatment of minor illness in primary care: a national survey of patient satisfaction, attitudes and preferences regarding a wider nursing role.

Background: This study investigated patient opinion about the provision of nurse-led vs. doctor-led primary health care in the treatment of minor illness.

Design: A postal questionnaire survey including discrete choice experiment (DCE) of a national sample followed by telephone interviews with respondent volunteers.