PsychologyOnline to speak at Medical Innovations Summit

Barnaby Perks, chief executive of PsychologyOnline, is to share the stage with campaigners, innovators, and entrepreneurs at the Medical Innovations Summit hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine (RSM), which promises an inspirational programme of speakers from across the world.

Sarah Bateup, clinical lead at PsychologyOnline, will join Barnaby to talk about the company’s growing success. By offering text-based cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with a therapist over the internet, PsychologyOnline’s unique service can be accessed from home at a time to suit the individual. It has now been implemented by five NHS clinical commissioning groups with excellent recovery rates.

Improving access to support is also the theme of a presentation by television presenter and campaigner Esther Rantzen CBE. She will be talking about The Silver Line, a free confidential telephone helpline which seeks to help older people who may feel isolated, lonely and depressed. The service, set up after a successful pilot funded by Comic Relief, received more than 1,500 requests for help in its first week of operation. 

Also talking the floor will be Jen Hyatt, founder and chief executive of the Big White Wall.  She will describe how this digital healthcare service offers a social online forum for accessing mental wellbeing resources.

Using technology to improve healthcare is a pervasive theme of the Medical Innovations Summit which also features a video game to blast cancer and an intelligent knife that can “sniff out” tumours.

Sarah says that we are increasingly familiar with technology of all kinds:  “Communicating through written social media is familiar to many people. We have found that using text-based dialogue is particularly beneficial for CBT. It creates an opportunity for the person to reflect on situations as they are written down and this helps get to the root of the problem more quickly.

“People often have ‘light bulb’-type realisations during CBT when they see how to change their behaviours, but this can be transient. With a downloadable transcript it is possible to go back over the session later to regain that benefit.”

For more information about the entrepreneurs and innovators presenting at the RSM’s Medical Innovations Summit please visit: www.rsm.ac.uk/innovations/.  You can also register for the event, which takes place on 5 April 2014, free of charge.