Health IT Central recently posted an interview with co-creator of the IAPT programme, Professor David Clark, in which he discusses whether emental health tools could provide a much needed solution to the high demand and low resource faced by our mental health services.
In the article, Clark covers the benefits of emental health as well as some of the challenges. We’ve pulled our our 5 favorite quotes – give them some thought and read the article in full here.
- “The first [advantage of emental health is] potential convenience for the patient. They don’t have to travel to the clinic; they can work on the programme at a time that suits them, evenings or at weekends, for instance, which is when clinics often aren’t open.”
- “Clinicians can manage quite a lot more patients if [their] work is facilitated by internet programmes.”
- “There is no reason why, with further developments in Virtual Reality, similar technology to that which bedroom gamers are using couldn’t be expanded for use as part of an online treatment programme.”
- “You get considerably bigger improvements and lower dropout rates if […] treatment is what we call ‘facilitated’. So you have an allocated therapist, but they’re communicating with you largely by email and text and so on.”
- “You need first to accumulate evidence for your new product, then you need to work out how you can train clinicians to use it and the final thing is you need to make it economical compared to the obvious alternatives – which are, currently, delivering the programmes through booklets – which works very well and is popular.”
What are your thoughts? Join the conversation and share by tweeting us at @iaptustweets using the hashtag #discoverprism
