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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

The association between remote primary care and acute mental health service use

The association of remote primary care and acute mental health service use

As the proportion of primary care consultations conducted remotely increased, emergency mental health contacts, psychiatric admissions, inpatient bed-days, and compulsory admissions decreased.

The study aimed to examine whether the proportion of primary care consultations conducted remotely was associated with acute mental health service use among adults with depression, anxiety disorders, or severe mental illness. A retrospective cohort design was used, linking records from the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) platform and Lambeth DataNet, and included 107,993 adults diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or severe mental illness between January 2019 and December 2021. The exposure was defined as the proportion of primary care consultations conducted remotely; outcomes were emergency contacts with liaison psychiatry services, psychiatric hospital admissions, the number of inpatient bed-days, and compulsory admissions under the Mental Health Act. Associations were estimated using generalized estimating equations with a negative binomial distribution, accounting for clustering by general practice, and missing data were handled using multiple imputation by chained equations. Acute mental health service use was lower among those with a higher proportion of remote consultations; these associations remained consistent in sensitivity analyses and after adjustment for demographic and clinical factors. In conclusion, remote consultations may be an effective component of primary care delivery for people with common and severe mental illnesses.

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