The impact of telemedicine on primary mental health care in Canada

Abstract

Telemedicine has become widely used in today’s Canadian health care system. The area of mental health has been known to adopt telemedicine strategies in order to address some of the issues currently facing the mental health care system in Canada, such as psychiatrist shortages or lack of services available in rural areas. This paper reports on the effectiveness that telemedicine has had on the mental health care system in Canada, based on a Canadian literature review with supporting literature from the United States. This paper also includes recommendations for further improvement involving the use of telemedicine. The recommendations include: that closer collaboration amongst all levels of government take place when designing the mental health care framework, that telepsychiatry and telemental health services be built into policies, and that follow up studies take place on existing pilot studies and existing telemental health services in Canada.