Perception and satisfaction in telemedicine on Mental Health among professionals during the COVID outbreak. A real-world experience in telepsychiatry. (Preprint)

BACKGROUND There are previous experiences on the perception of patients with the use of telemedicine (TM). After break down caused by pandemic Covid19 crisis, mental health professionals in Spain should develop their work in a telematics way. OBJECTIVE Explore about the perceptions and interests of mental health professionals who have performed TM in the pandemic situation. METHODS An Ad-hoc questionary on the perception of the TM, the Work Satisfaction Questionnaire of Font Roja, and questions on patients satisfaction ere used. The data collected included 112 professionals of the Psychiatric Service who began to perform TM massively on March 16, following the alarm status declaration for ten weeks. More than 12.000 medical consultations were carried out on the phone. RESULTS High levels of satisfaction was detected among professional TM would function as a complement to the traditional system of face-to-face visits (n-112, f-109, 96.5%), only 9.7% (f-11) believed that the telematic system would completely replace face-toface visits. 60,8% did not consider this a monotonous work. The older the health workers were, the more satisfied they felt on their telephone follow-up consultation. The higher the previous experience the more satisfaction was showed. There are gender differences and women seems to be more adapted. CONCLUSIONS TM can be implemented without much effort, although the time, methods and resources used must be managed. Satisfaction among professionals is high, especially among those with more clinical experience. Patient satisfaction must be contrasted. CLINICALTRIAL This study is not a trial