Interactive television in psychiatry

Abstract

Population movements away from large cities and congestion in urban areas create problems for the delivery of psychiatric care which are compounded by the move towards greater care in the community. These developing service patterns require adequate methods of communication between service com ponents. There is a proliferation of new technology offering opportunities for improved national and international communication in psychiatry as in other branches of medicine. It will be important to decide which technological innovations will improve the efficiency of service delivery rather than end up as expensive 'gadgets', or solutions looking for prob lems to solve. In this paper the use of interactive television in psychiatry is reviewed and the impli cations for the evaluation of new communications technology are discussed.

Preliminary evaluation of a Low‐Cost VideoConferencing (LCVC) system for remote cognitive testing of adult psychiatric patients

“…The change to small and medium-sized units in the community provides a challenge for communications technology to facilitate the assessment of patients and the exchange of information between staff members. Whilst psychiatrists have used telephone and video technology in the past (Dwyer, 1973;Solow & Weiss, 1971), the technology has not been widely applied as cost is a major factor (Mclaren, Watson, Summerfield & Lipsedge, 1992). In this paper, a preliminary evaluation of a part of the psychiatric assessment via a prototype digitized Low-Cost VideoConferencing system (LCVC) is described.…”

Assessment for psychotherapy by interactive television suitable for transmission through telephone links

“…While services are changing to meet such needs (Pedder, 1989)there are powerful economic restrictions on service expansion. The potential for communications technology such as interactive television to aid the delivery of general psychiatric services has been reviewed by McLaren et al (1992) and similar arguments apply to the delivery of psychotherapy.…”