Profile: Don Perlgut, Rural Health Education Foundation

Just because a technology is old doesn’t necessarily make it a bad technology when it comes to trying to bridge the gap in health outcomes between city and country.

This is something the Rural Health Education Foundation has been doing since 1992 by using television and DVDs to deliver health education material to people living in rural and remote areas.

“There are 7 million people living in remote and rural areas,” said the Foundation’s chief executive, Don Perlgut. “These are people that might not have access to broadband or computers.”

Until recently, the primary way the Foundation’s educational material found its way to doctors and patients was either through satellite TV or DVD sets dispatched to remote clinics and hospitals. Live TV has also played a part in the Foundation’s work.

Compared to the web, social media and broadband these are all old technologies. But, according to Mr Perlgut, they are technologies that work well in their given context. “We have 600 locations for our satellite TV service,” said Mr Perlgut. “In these locations, you don’t have easy access to other technologies.”

Despite this, the last three years has seen the Foundation start to use streaming webcasts, podcasts and downloadable material to augment the DVD and satellite TV selections.

The Foundation is a non-profit, with much of its funding coming from the Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA), along with private philanthropic donations, and no-strings-attached educational grants from pharmaceutical companies.

“Our educational material focuses on the success stories,” said Mr Perlgut. “I’d estimate the number of people that receive our material, including patients and health professionals, would number in the tens of thousands.

Using older technology is effective for the Foundation, but Mr Perlgut worries about the digital divide caused by poverty and lack of access. It’s going to be a big issue in the future, as we move towards a web-based, remote telehealth model for rural and regional healthcare.

“There’s a profound difference between the healthcare you get in a capital city, and the healthcare you get in a rural or regional area,” he said. “The more remote you get, the worse the life expectancy, and it’s worse again for indigenous people.”

Mr Perlgut estimates 15 percent of the population, or approximately 3.4 million people, could be left behind as healthcare transitions to a new digital delivery model.

“It’s not just about poverty. There’s also social and cultural exclusion from using technology, and that’s compounded by the location were people live,” he said. “This has profound implications for healthcare for disadvantaged Australians.”

The NBN will go some way to fixing some of these problems, said Mr Perlgut, but it’s not the only answer. “We can’t just look to the government and expect them to fix the problem,” he said. “It’s also a community problem, and we have to look to our communities to help fix some of these problems.

“There’s an urgency to these matters, because we’re rolling out this new technology, but the problem is that not all of Australia is coming with it.”