News round-up (22 November 2024)

The scandal of mental health patients being placed in out-of-area psychiatric units continues, with a new report finding that patients and their families are being harmed by the practice. Two studies report mildly positive findings on the relationship between internet use and mental health, with one reporting that over-50s who use the internet are less likely to be depressed than those who don’t, and another finding that using techniques to manage social media use can boost people’s wellbeing. In another piece of good news, a Northern Ireland pilot has found that using mental health nurses to answer 999 calls can dramatically reduce the numbers in mental health crisis attending A&E.

Main stories this week

AI speech recognition solution dramatically cuts medical reporting times

A new version of SpeechReport, a speech recognition tool, has been released, promising to make it simpler and quicker for health care professionals to dictate medial reporting notes.

 

New EU virtual reality project aims to revolutionise health care

A new $7.8m programme called VR Health Champions has been launched in the EU with the aim of accelerating the uptake of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

 

AI tool shows three times as many long Covid cases than previously thought

More than one in five people have long Covid, according to a new AI-based study from Harvard Medical School.

 

Mental health patients ‘abandoned’ by ministers

Government ministers in Scotland have been accused of “abandoning” mental health patients after new data showed a rise in delayed discharge waits.

 

Other stories

Mental health patients harmed by being sent to units far from home, report finds

Mental health patients in England are being harmed by the increase in placements in psychiatric units far from their homes and families, a new report has found.

The report, from the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB), says that some patients are experiencing anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of being sent to out-of-area units. Some have even died by suicide.

The HSSIB spoke to patients and family members about their experiences, many of whom described feelings of anger, frustration and a loss of trust in the mental health system. Neil Alexander, a senior safety investigator, said “urgent improvements” were needed to reduce harm to patients.

Although the previous government had a target of ending out-of-area placements by 2021, data shows that out-of-area placements are increasing. In March 2023 there were 793 such placements in England, compared with almost 900 a year later.

 

Mental health nurses on 999 calls reduce A&E admissions

A pilot project in which mental health nurses speak to people experiencing a mental health crisis on 999 calls has led to reduction in the numbers admitted to accident and emergency departments.

The project in the South Eastern Health Trust area in Northern Ireland has involved 12 mental health practitioners working in the ambulance service’s control room at weekends.

People who phone up saying they are experiencing a mental health crisis are passed to a medical health practitioner, who will give a mental health assessment and “de-escalate” the situation. Anne-Marie Scott, one of the mental health nurse practitioners answering the calls, said that when people call in distress, the nurses listen to what they say, adding: “We give them time to vent and then try, with them, to rationalise how they are feeling and try to break everything down. Then we can, with their consent, refer on to statutory or voluntary services for additional support.”

About 40% of the people phoning up in crisis, who would otherwise have been attended by an ambulance and taken to A&E, no longer need to do so.

 

Internet use in adults over age 50 linked to better mental health

People over the age of 50 are less likely to experience depressive symptoms if they use the internet, an international study has found.

The study, a meta-analysis that looked at data covering  87,559 participants and 23 countries, was carried out by researchers from City University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong, and published in Nature Human Behaviour.

It found that internet use was associated with fewer depressive symptoms and better self-reported health. Participants who used the internet daily or weekly reported fewer depressive symptoms and better self-reported health compared to those who used it less frequently or not at all.

In the US and England, where genetic data was available, positive associations between internet use and mental health were observed across three genetic risk categories. In the US, England, and China, a higher frequency of internet use was related to better mental health outcomes.

 

Oxford research centre leads to seven new mental health clinics

Seven new clinics dedicated to supporting people with hard-to-treat depression will be set up across the UK, drawing on the work of an Oxford research clinic.

The new clinics will provide clinical assessments and new treatments for patients with difficult-to-treat depression, and will be based in Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, north London, and Sheffield. They will use new types of medication, therapy and neurostimulation techniques.

The clinics build on an existing network of research clinics including Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre’s Treatment Resistant Depression Clinic. The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Office for Life Sciences have invested £18 million into the new clinics.

Professor Michael Browning, professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Oxford, said that the additional funding will allow researchers to assess these new treatments quickly and reduce the time it takes for patients to access them.

 

New pilot designed to help teens with anxiety and depression

A new “teen-friendly” mindfulness therapy is to be piloted across England.

The Attend study will recruit 480 teenagers and their parents to take part in assessing the effectiveness of the therapy. The trials will take place in London, Devon, Sussex, Nottingham, Oxford, Cambridge and Peterborough.

The University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and the Universities of Exeter and Surrey developed Mindfulness for Adolescents and Carers, a programme based on a technique known as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT).

Professor Tamsin Ford, the head of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, said that too many young people struggled with their mental health and failed to receive the support they needed through the NHS. She said she hoped that adapting MBCT to make it more engaging and effective for teenagers could improve matters.

 

Smarter social media use could ease anxiety and loneliness, research suggests

Using techniques to manage social media use can lead to improvements in mental health, a new study has found.

The study, carried out by the University of British Columbia, followed 393 Canadian young adults, aged between 17 and 29, who had all reported some mental health concerns tied to social media. Over six weeks, the participants were split into three groups: some continued their usual habits, others quit social media entirely and the rest learned techniques to use it more “intentionally”. This means they did things such as muting accounts that caused negative feelings or focusing more on meaningful connections.

The group that left social media altogether saw reductions in their anxiety and depression levels but still felt lonely, while the group that stuck with their usual habits didn’t see any improvements in their mental health. The group that learned to use social media more intentionally did not reduce their usage as much as the abstainers but felt less lonely. Researchers concluded that “using social media differently and abstaining from social media may each benefit well-being”.