Virtual doc will see you

Published: 20 January, 2011

• TOM Foot describes how the directors of Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust have come up with a whole new 21st century solution – virtual psychiatric hospitals (Patients to be cared for in ‘virtual hospital’, January 14).  

This novel idea is repeated several times in the new documentation without any clear picture of what it means. Does it mean that, instead of having real beds, there are virtual beds into which virtual patients are admitted for virtual treatment?  



These ideas are hard if not impossible to understand and people could be forgiven for believing they are intended to confuse the public into believing that 100 beds could safely be closed.  

One question that needs to be put to Sylvia Tang, the trust’s medical director who leads on this project, is whether she is proposing to have virtual doctors and nurses who receive virtual salaries for their work. This would help a great deal towards the £20million savings the trust claims it needs to make. 

On the whole, if I am ill I want to see a real doctor with medical skills. If I need hospital treatment, I want to be admitted into a real ward with real beds and real people to care for me.  

I do not want my treatment to be part of a computer game, however clever it may be. Virtual hospital delusion sounds like a symptom which might be presented for psychiatric treatment in the real world.

DAVID BROWN
NW3