Family doctors are worried about the availability of psychiatric care for children, because the only child psychiatrist at the Northern Estonian Regional Hospital (PERH) who carries out outpatient visits and electronic consultations is leaving his job.
In the last days of the year, the only outpatient child psychiatrist at the Northern Estonian Regional Hospital announced that he would work for a private company. The doctor’s departure puts young people in need of help in a difficult situation, because without electronic consultation it is basically impossible to get an appointment with a psychiatrist.
“Electronic consultation is the moment in which the family doctor visits, outlines the young person’s concerns and sends the prepared patient to the psychiatrist, and if the psychiatrist sees that it is indeed a patient of his competence, he can send him for the visit,” said the family doctor Reet Laidoja.
Until now, family doctors had a tacit agreement with hospitals that younger children were referred to the Tallinn Children’s Hospital, while adolescents were treated at the Northern Estonia Regional Hospital. According to the family doctor, the queues for the electronic consultation are already long and many have therefore turned to private clinics.
“Some problems concern the development of children, support for their studies and general guidance on the right path. It doesn’t take a terribly long time, but at the same time the child continues to develop, and in this sense, some needs to help could be time critical,” Laidoja said.
According to Ülo Kallassalu, head of the psychiatric clinic at the Northern Estonian Regional Hospital, they found themselves in a difficult situation, because the mental health nurse also leaves with the doctor. Finding a new doctor is difficult.
“We have also published job advertisements, the information is out, but until the circumstances are clarified, we cannot provide this service. We focus on hospital care, where we also have two doctors, one is elderly and the other is he just graduated. So we are trying to convince the department to continue. It is very important that people get emergency and hospital help,” Kallassalu said.
According to the Health Insurance Fund, PERH did not violate the contract, because according to it it must offer electronic consultations in the psychiatric specialty, while there is no separate agreement for child psychiatry.
“When people go to a new clinic, it seems to us that the volume of treatments has increased, and therefore we can take the volume of contracts with us. Maybe we can adapt the contracts according to how people move,” said Marko Tähnas , head of the health insurance partnership department.
The child psychiatrist’s new employer, the private clinic MPPK, is ready to ask the health fund for an increase in the volume of contracts, but to what extent, according to Peep Piiber, member of the company’s board of directors, is too early to know say it.
2024-01-17 19:28:00
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