Association of negative opinions towards telepsychiatry with its prior use and the level of geriatric psychiatry care among nursing home stakeholders

Objectives: Despite the benefits of geriatric telepsychiatry, the lack of support from the staff remains one of the major challenges it faces. We wanted to explore whether negative opinions towards telepsychiatry in nursing home (NH) stakeholders were affected by prior experience with this modality and by the level of geriatric psychiatric care provided in NH. Methods: We conducted an opinion survey towards telepsychiatry among NH stakeholders (executive managers and care providers) from 10 NH, divided into 5 groups of differing levels of geriatric psychiatric care: Group A used telepsychiatry, Group B had the smallest level of psychiatry care (i.e. without any mental health professional visit), Group C had visiting nurses of general psychiatry, Group D had visiting geriatric psychiatry nurses, Group E had mobile teams including nurses and geriatric psychiatrists. Results: 216 (78.5 %) questionnaires were returned We found significant differences among the groups (Mean Group A (meanA)=63.5, standard error of the mean Group A (SEMA)=1.6); meanB=67.9, SEMB=2.2; meanC=75.6, SEMC=1.6; meanD=69.6, SEMD=2.1; meanE=73.1, SEME=1.9; F(4208)=6.6333, p = 4.824 × 10–5). All groups except group B were significantly different from group A, even after adjusting for age, gender, professional category and knowledge of telepsychiatry. Discussion: Negative opinions towards telepsychiatry were negatively associated with telepsychiatry use in the NH and positively associated with a high level of geriatric psychiatric care, specifically the presence of mobile geriatric psychiatry teams. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that telepsychiatry and face-to-face geriatric psychiatry are in competition. Telepsychiatry acceptance program should aim at describing its complementarity to usual geriatric psychiatry care.