ArticleBMJ global health2021
Establishing and operating a 'virtual ward' system to provide care for patients with COVID-19 at home: experience from The Gambia.
Article in BMJ global health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review of methods used for COVID-19 telehealth systems evaluation: lessons from past experiences for future use.BMC health services research · 2025Pooled it
- Virtual Health Care in Hospital-at-Home Models for Patients With Acute Infections: A Scoping Review.Mayo Clinic proceedings. Digital health · 2025Review
- Review
- The Transformative Power of Virtual Hospitals for Revolutionising Healthcare Delivery.Public health reviews · 2024Review
- Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the coverage and timeliness of routine childhood vaccinations in the Gambia, 2015-2021.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Are we there yet? Unbundling the potential adoption and integration of telemedicine to improve virtual healthcare services in African health systems.Sensors international · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
21 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Health systems in sub-Saharan Africa have remained overstretched from dealing with endemic diseases, which limit their capacity to absorb additional stress from new and emerging infectious diseases. Against this backdrop, the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic presented an additional challenge of insufficient hospital beds and human resource for health needed to deliver hospital-based COVID-19 care. Emerging evidence from high-income countries suggests that a 'virtual ward' (VW) system can provide adequate home-based care for selected patients with COVID-19, thereby reducing the need for admissions and mitigate additional stress on hospital beds. We established a VW at the Medical Research Council Unit, The Gambia at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a biomedical research institution located in The Gambia, a low-income west African country, to care for members of staff and their families infected with COVID-19. In this practice paper, we share our experience focusing on the key components of the system, how it was set up and successfully operated to support patients with COVID-19 in non-hospital settings. We describe the composition of the multidisciplinary team operating the VW, how we developed clinical standard operating procedures, how clinical oversight is provided and the use of teleconsultation and data capture systems to successfully drive the process. We demonstrate that using a VW to provide an additional level of support for patients with COVID-19 at home is feasible in a low-income country in sub-Saharan Africa. We believe that other low-income or resource-constrained settings can adopt and contextualise the processes described in this practice paper to provide additional support for patients with COVID-19 in non-hospital settings.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.