Customer: Commission of the European Communities, DG Research
Duration: January 2003 – December 2005
The overall aim of the project is to develop services to provide modular, non-conventional, remote psychiatric and psychotherapeutic assistance for remote areas. By these means quality of life of the users, quality of mental health care and the economic strength of the region should improve and overweight the costs of implementation and service support. The project will reduce inequalities in mental health services and status among European regions.
The work starts with a literature review of the state of the art on remote therapeutical psychiatric and/or psychotherapeutic interventions, complemented by field work and an international workshop, to result in appropriate service delivery scenarios.
According to the services specified above, the different user groups’ needs and epidemiological findings, nine different remote service categories will be defined (a diagnosis, a counselling and a therapeutical one for patients, informal carers and professionals), as well as an overall service layout. They will be supported by interactive and user-friendly tools for service content presentation; namely an interactive web chat tool and site, a database of reference case studies, an expert tool for therapy guidance, a tool for service confidentiality and security and the necessary communication tools and service delivery platforms.
All the above developments (content, tools, delivery platforms) will be integrated into modular service typologies, taking into account relevant security, legal and ethical issues.
The proposed services will be tested in 3 different sites in remote areas (islands), representing different service combinations, geographical regions and support needs (but with homogenous user groups), using a common set of evaluation parameters and data processing tools. The cost effectiveness of each proposed service and tool will be analysed, guidelines on appropriate service provision will be formulated and recommendations for supporting policy interventions will be issued.
Role of TREDIT:
– Design and realization of the ISLANDS expert tool
– Evaluation Manager of the project
– Quality Assurance Manager of the project