书籍

描述

Language and cultural barriers are among greatest obstacles for cross-cultural patient population to access adequate care. Mental health-care services for asylum seekers, refugees and migrants are usually provided by interpreters due to the shortage of professionals with the appropriate cross-cultural background and language skills. “Ethnic matching” appears to be the most desirable model used in addressing language barriers and cultural disparities in mental health-care provision of cross-cultural patient population. However, ethnic matching is not that easy to implement in daily clinical practice. When the patient and the ‘matching’ clinician are located in different places then a consultation is likely to require travel, either for the patient or the clinician. To overcome geographical barriers we may use telepsychiatry. The main assumption of my work was that the application of the cross-cultural telepsychiatry model may have direct positive impact on patient satisfaction, waiting times to initial assessment, treatment adherence, and eventually the quality of care. The results of the presented pilot projects suggest that having access to mental health expertise via telepsychiatry can be useful in ameliorating some of the issues identified with: 1. Remote social work practice 2. Shared care model with general practices 3. Assessment and/or treatment of ethnic minorities