Funding Granted for Telehealth Research at CCI
01 August 2020
During the COVID-19 pandemic, CCI made a rapid transition to providing psychological treatment via telehealth (i.e., sessions held through video conferencing or telephone) in March-April of 2020. Understanding patient’s experiences of this transition to telehealth is of critical importance in the event that we experience a second wave of COVID-19 in Western Australia and, more broadly, will contribute to understanding how existing services could be expanded to meet the need of patients with eating disorders who are unable to access face-to-face therapy sessions (e.g., those living in rural or remote locations). We are interested in assessing the impact of delivering evidence-based eating disorder treatment via telehealth on our patient during this time on factors such as eating disorder symptoms, mood, suicidal and medical risk, therapeutic alliance, and quality of treatment. To do this, we have developed a questionnaire (drawing from the existing literature) to evaluate patients’ experience of receiving telehealth during COVID-19. We will also look at the treatment outcomes for clients during the telehealth sessions using measures they we collect as part of our routine clinical care. In doing so, we hope to look at t...