Authors (including presenting author) :
Chan MY, Cheng PYI, Lai TK, Yeung KB
Affiliation :
Department of Psychiatry, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital
Introduction :
The rapid spread of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has forced most countries to take drastic public health measures, including the suspension of community support to psychiatric patients. This has suddenly created the need to adapt and expand telehealth care across the world. For psychiatric patients in the community, telehealth is developed in Community Psychiatric Service (CPS) for provision of preventive, promotive and curative healthcare services by health care professionals at a distance using the information and communication technologies. The telehealth in CPS includes (a) Tele-visit consists of mental health assessment, psychosocial and health education, intervention by healthcare professionals; (b) Teleconference is conducted for case discussion and consultation by CPS team with all related mental health professionals of HA and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs); c) Online recovery activities are conducted by case manager and peer support worker. The telehealth in Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital (PYNEH) Community Psychiatric Service (CPS) commenced in Sept 2020. There was a need to explore the experience and comment from the service users.
Objectives :
To promote telehealth in CPS by developing staff competence and logistic for the use of telehealth. To perform patient satisfactory survey to explore experience of users.
Methodology :
Guideline for telehealth in CPS was created by the working group on CPS and task Group on use of telehealth in CPS and endorsed in May 2021. Training materials for staff and patients were prepared. Training sessions for all PYNEH staff were conducted in May 2021. Telephone survey was conducted in the CPS of PYNEH by team supervisors from Jul 2021 to Nov 2022 with random sampling from home visit of case managers each month. Questions with 6 points Likert scale were set to rate the satisfaction of the telehealth and open question were set to collect comment to the tele visit.
Result & Outcome :
There were total 1100 tele-visit/recovery activities conducted from Jul 2021 to Nov 2022. There were total 294 participants in the survey. 5% of the participants rated 6 ‘very strongly satisfied’, 80% of the participants rated 5 ‘strongly satisfied’ and 15% of the 4 ‘satisfied’. The comment included ‘it was easy to arrange’, ‘it was a good option for community care’, and ‘network unstable might affect the quality’ etc. 80% of the participants considered the factors of promoting use of telehealth as introduction/demonstration to users. Telehealth is worthy to promote as an alternative and effective way of health care delivery in public health care. Enhancement could be made with promotion of telehealth with demonstration video or brief introduction kit.
