What are Tele-Mental Health Services?
Tele-Mental Health is a creative solution for increasing access to child psychiatry and reducing wait times for children and youth in rural, remote and underserved communities.
- Uses secure videoconferencing technology,
- Provides consultations with child psychiatrists to children/youth and their families without having to leave their community,
- Provides direct consultation that allows for diagnosis and treatment recommendations, and
- Provides agency staff with vital education and training to build their professional expertise so they can provide better service to children and youth in their community.
Tele-Mental Health is a consultation model with access to specialized mental health consults provided by three Hubs: The Hospital for Sick Children, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and Vanier Children’s Mental Wellness.
Service Area
There are six Service Coordination Agencies across the province coordinating access to service. Three Service Areas are dedicated to the general population service providers; and three overlapping Service Areas, are dedicated to First Nation, Metis, Inuit and urban Indigenous service providers.
Woodview is the Service Coordination Agency for service ‘Area 2’ that includes Wellington, Niagara, Haldimand, Norfolk, Brant, Perth, Oxford, Elgin, Chatham-Kent, Lambton, Huron, Bruce and Grey. As a Tele-Mental Health Service Coordination, Woodview is responsible for outreach, partnership development and organizational support.
Benefits
– secure and private
– convenient: no need to drive long distances and decreases time lost from work/school
– multilingual services
– reduced wait times
– documented recommendations for the family to follow up on with support from their community and primary care team
Who can make a referral
All publicly funded mental health professionals working with children and youth are now able to refer to the service. This includes professionals working in:
- Child and youth mental health agencies
- School boards
- Hospital out-patient programs
- Family health teams
- Aboriginal Health Access Centres
- Friendship Centres
- Youth justice settings
- Child welfare agencies
- Other community-based agencies that provide child and youth mental health services
Service Coordination Agencies facilitate access to specialized mental health consultations and do not provide direct mental health services to children and youth which continue to be the responsibility of the referring service provider. The referral process for Tele-Mental Health includes a “Service Readiness” review, which entails screening, assessment and prioritization of referrals.
