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Videoconferencing
cures
She started developing a form of anorexia several years ago after an illness destroyed her appetite, and found that she had nobody to turn to for help on the sparsely populated islands. "My weight was dropping and I had lost all interest in eating," Kate recalls. With no professional advice or therapy on hand, her only option for specialist help was to go 200 miles to the Scottish mainland. "It was just unthinkable at the time," she says. "I would have had to stay overnight away from home, when I wasn’t even fit enough to travel." Happily she has now started to gain weight and self-confidence, without ever having to leave her island home. Thanks to a pioneering service which brings specialist help direct to her, Kate is able to `visit’ her local health centre once a week for a virtual counselling session with clinical psychologist Susan Simpson, via a video-conferencing link-up live to the Royal Cornhill Hospital (RCH), Aberdeen. Almost 50 persons in the
Shetlands have now benefited from various forms of virtual therapy
brought to them down the line from Aberdeen. Not only is the technology
cheap and easy to use but also many patients actually prefer remote
therapy to face-to-face interviews. `Often with eating disorders, people
feel very ashamed of their condition,’ says Susan Simpson, who has
developed the service. `With video-conferencing they feel they have more
space, they are not being confronted and many people say they like
having a bit more control over the sessions.’ More importantly, the
approach appears to be highly effective. Nine out of 12 patients with
eating disorders were symptom-free a year after undergoing videotherapy,
while hypnotherapy has proved popular, too. Now Simpson hopes to extend
the service to people in other remote parts of Scotland and there are
moves to expand similar projects including a minor injuries service,
which links far-flung clinics to emergency services at Aberdeen Royal
Infirmary.
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THE
idyllic isolation of the Shetland Isles, off the north coast of
Scotland, became a desolate prison for Kate Richardson when she
developed anorexia nervosa. With her weight below 42 kilos, Kate (not
her real name) had scarcely enough energy to leave her home, let alone
make a gruelling 12-hour ferry trip or costly flight to the nearest
eating-disorders service in Aberdeen, on the Scottish mainland.