Oman’s unsung heroes: how telemedicine helped provide treatment to patients during the pandemic | Times of Oman

Oman’s unsung heroes: how telemedicine helped provide treatment to patients during the pandemic | Times of Oman

Muscat: With many hospitals and clinics closed to all but COVID patients during the peak of the pandemic, telemedicine helped doctors reach out to their patients who were in urgent need of medical care for other ailments, as well as those suffering from chronic illnesses. Dr Mohammed Lamki, a senior consultant endocrinologist in Oman, shed light on how telemedicine helped bridge the gap between doctor and patient during the pandemic, and called it a sustainable way to take medicine forward in the future. "We had to shut down most of the services during this period, especially clinical services related to elective patients," he said, referring to the peak of the pandemic in Oman. "The doctors came up with a sustainable and clever idea to set up telemedicine services. This is a very new idea to the Ministry of Health, so it did have a lot of challenges." He added: "we had to come up with a system to reach the masses both outside and within Muscat. We did have the support of the telecom companies, but they could not fulfil most of the facilities we wanted, so we had to use a landline, without visual capabilities." The biggest challenge in