Online Consultations Between General Practitioners and Psychiatrists in the Netherlands

2021

Objective: To examine the nature and scope of questions about psychiatric patient cases submitted by general practitioners (GPs) to an established online consultation platform and to determine if they could have been answered by consulting existing clinical guidelines.Methods: All anonymized psychiatric cases submitted by GPs to the online electronic Prisma platform between September 2018 and November 2019 were examined in a mixed-methods study. Descriptive statistics and qualitative thematic analysis were used, followed by axial coding to arrive at overarching themes to characterize cases.Results: Of the 136 included cases, 44.1% concerned female patients and about half concerned patients …