Open AccessTelepsychiatry and face-to-face psychiatric consultations during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia: patients being heard and seen
Author(s) -
Jeffrey Cl Looi,
Stephen Allison,
Tarun Bastiampillai,
William Pring,
Steve Kisely
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
australasian psychiatry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.444
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1440-1665
pISSN - 1039-8562
DOI - 10.1177/10398562211046301
Subject(s) - telehealth , telemedicine , telepsychiatry , face to face , medicine , pandemic , covid-19 , videoconferencing , government (linguistics) , family medicine , nursing , health care , multimedia , political science , disease , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , pathology , computer science , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law
Objective: The Australian federal government introduced additional Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) telehealth-items to facilitate care by private psychiatrists during the COVID-19 pandemic.Method: We analysed private psychiatrists’ uptake of video and telephone-telehealth, as well as total (telehealth and face-to-face) consultations for April 2020–April 2021. We compare these to face-to-face consultations for April 2018–April 2019. MBS-Item service data were extracted for COVID-19-psychiatrist-video- and telephone-telehealth item numbers and compared with face-to-face consultations for the whole of Australia.Results: Psychiatric consultation numbers (telehealth and face-to-face) were 13% higher during the first year of the pandemic compared with 2018–2019, with telehealth accounting for 40% of this total. Face-to-face consultations were 65% of the comparative number of 2018–2019 consultations. There was substantial usage of telehealth consultations during 2020–2021. The majority of telehealth involved short telephone consultations of ⩽15–30 min, while video was used more, in longer consultations.Conclusions: Private psychiatrists and patients continued using the new telehealth-items during 2020–2021. This compensated for decreases in face-to-face consultations and resulted in an overall increase in the total patient contacts compared to 2018–2019.