Research has it that mental illness develops in one person out of four in human’s lifetime. There are families that have been victim to the common suicide. This challenge is the leading cause of depression which brings about mental disability.
Ireland mental health service has experienced other challenging factors despite the great task done by the frontline staff. Problems occur when it comes to recruitment and retention of staff. With the high international market completion of the staff, HSE strives to attract well trained mental health professionals. Consequently, vacancies remain in services all around the country. In such a scenario, we should rely more on many business IT solutions aimed to enhance human resources. This means we need to adapt better solutions within the limits of available resources to facilitate improved health care.
Starting on a simple note can work out. For instance, using basic business IT solutions such as text-messaging would be a trick. It helps facilitate the management of prescriptions, staff appointment, and patient communication more efficiently. This measure aims at improving the services on where it’s already operational and perhaps creating time for clinical assessment as well as delivery of quality care.
Adopting this system of text-messaging as a routine practice would revolutionize for better service delivery across all the mental health care centres in Ireland. Maybe this is what’s needed before the existence of extensive investment considered as the less proven initiative.
Maximizing the use of electronic patients’ record and connected-up IT system would also help optimize human resources and increase efficiency. It’s quite realistic to see the transformation on where electronic records have been used. Meaning these measures should just be rolled out in a natural manner.
The innovation of advance business IT solution has so far delivered specific mental health care. However, despite holding real potential, it still requires more thought for advancement. Such a technique has been experimented in other countries with remote health care but successfully done assessments and therapy sessions through tablets and video links. Although these consultations may not be that effective but are much better than none.
Telepsychiatry and video links are used in the scenario where distance is the ideal problem. So when there are patients having therapeutic relationships, these approaches can be used to follow up their appointments. Although it may be clear, these innovations tend to reduce human resource needed to operate the mental health services as compared to traditional methods.
It’s significant to have various ways of delivering proper health care for patients who find challenges of in-person assessment. These also correspond to the situation where travel time limits the number of patient’s appointment. Logically, if business IT solutions can be applied to broaden in-person consultation and health care treatment, we would proudly say technology is greatly contributing to the improvement of health services. As a result, it would reduce the need for seeking treatment from other people like trained professionals.
Therefore, we should not presume that business IT solutions are less resourceful, or necessarily effective than the traditional methods. With this in mind, the fact will always remain that trained professionals play a key role in health care delivery no matter what virtual innovations. Journalist, Bernard Levin stated that silicon chip will transform everything except those that matter, however, the rest will look upon us.