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eCAP (e-health Services for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry)

Description

The need for psychiatric services for children and adolescents generally exceeds service capacity. The main problems are an insufficient number of psychiatrists/specialists, long waiting times, limited capacity among primary care services and a heavy travel burden for both patients and their family, and outpatient specialists.

The services will increase the knowledge of local multidisciplinary experts about mental health and mental disorders of children and adolescents. Both preventive work and treatment close to the child and his/her developmental environments (school, daycare etc.) will be supported. The service mentioned above will use video consultations to bridge the distance between specialists, primary care, GPs, schools, and patients and their families.

The expected results are improved and more equal access to timely outpatient psychiatry services, specialist evaluation and treatment according to best practice, improved capacity in primary care and more rational use of specialist services. One of the project’s outcomes will be an operating model resulting from a comprehensive evaluation of the implementations in the participating countries that can be disseminated to other regions.

Goals

The aim of the eCAP project is to develop diagnosis, consultation, supervision, treatment and collaboration between professionals by using modern information technology - video conferencing (VC) systems. Services for distant multidisciplinary consultations in child psychiatry and clinical supervision, as well as booking systems for these services will be developed. The Development and Wellbeing Assessment (DAWBA: dawba.com), a computerised structured instrument for gathering diagnostic data from families, teachers and young people themselves) will also be implemented.

Conclusion

The Child and Adolescent Clinic (CAP) at the University Hospital of North Norway has developed and implemented a video conference system to treat patients, carry out multi-professional meetings with collaborating partners, and for educational purposes.

Treatment via videoconference is offered to patients as an alternative to face-to-face consultations. The treatment itself is unchanged but is being delivered in a new way. Using video conference systems, therapists can conduct treatment from their own offices and patients can sit in their own homes or in dedicated rooms at school. The use of video conference systems makes specialist services more accessible, and it saves time, travel and costs. Additionally, it makes it easier for a family to take part in the treatment and for young patients to avoid absence from school.