Dataset Information

Psychiatry and COVID-19: putting our best foot forward.

ABSTRACT: COVID-19 presents new challenges for psychiatry as clinical management, ethical dilemmas and administrative complications need to be addressed. The psychiatrist should protect the needs and rights of the mentally ill while maximising population health and ensuring solidarity, reciprocity and community well-being for all.

SUBMITTER: Strous RD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7256216 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Psychiatry and COVID-19: putting our best foot forward.

Strous Rael D RD Gold Azgad A

The British journal of psychiatry : the journal of mental science 20200801 2

COVID-19 presents new challenges for psychiatry as clinical management, ethical dilemmas and administrative complications need to be addressed. The psychiatrist should protect the needs and rights of the mentally ill while maximising population health and ensuring solidarity, reciprocity and community well-being for all. ...[more]

PMID: 32362295

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Project description:BackgroundAt the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was foreseen that the number of face-to-face psychiatry consultations would suffer a reduction. In order to compensate, the Australian Government introduced new Medicare-subsidized telephone and video-linked consultations. This study investigates how these developments affected the pre-existing inequity of psychiatry service delivery in Australia.MethodsThe study analyses five and a half years of national Medicare data listing all subsidized psychiatry consultation consumption aggregated to areas defined as Statistical Area level 3 (SA3s; which have population sizes of 30 k-300 k). Face-to-face, video-linked and telephone consultations are considered separately. The analysis consists of presenting rates of consumption, concentration graphs, and concentration indices to quantify inequity, using Socio Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) scores to rank the SA3 areas according to socio-economic disadvantage.ResultsThere is a 22% drop in the rate of face-to-face psychiatry consultation consumption across Australia in the final study period compared with the last study period predating the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the loss is made up by the introduction of the new subsidized telephone and video-linked consultations. Referring to the same time periods, there is a reduction in the inequity of the distribution of face-to-face consultations, where the concentration index reduces from 0.166 to 0.129. The new subsidized video-linked consultations are distributed with severe inequity in the great majority of subpopulations studied. Australia-wide, video-linked consultations are also distributed with gross inequity, with a concentration index of 0.356 in the final study period. The effect of this upon overall inequity was to cancel out the reduction of inequity resulting from the reduction of face-to face appointments.ConclusionAustralian subsidized video-linked psychiatry consultations have been distributed with gross inequity and have been a significant exacerbator of the overall inequity of psychiatric service provision. Future policy decisions wishing to reduce this inequity should take care to reduce the risk posed by expanding telepsychiatry.

Dataset Information

Psychiatry and COVID-19: putting our best foot forward.

Publications

Psychiatry and COVID-19: putting our best foot forward.

Similar Datasets

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