Page 19 - July Aug 2022 Newsletter Final_Neat

Continued from page 18 I offer my personal thanks to members of the Bylaws Committee for their thoughtful and dedi-
cated work. Bylaws Committee members are: Drs. Smita Das, Marvin Firestone, Anna Glezer,
Shana Levy, Zena Potash, Raymond Reyes, Diana Wertz and Farah Zaidi. And, thank you to our Executive Director
Maggie Furrow and former Executive Director Adrianne Davis for their valuable contributions.
Sydney T. Wright Jr, MD
Chairperson, NCPS Bylaws Committee To respond to this article, CLICK HERE

The Long Tail of Pandemic Adaptation:

Finding Our Way from Telehealth to the Physical Consulting Room

J. Connor Barnhart, MD, and Cynthia He, MD, PhD

UCSF Psychiatry

We are at the start of our fourth and final year of adult psychiatry
residency. By this point in training, many who came before us had
probably settled into a groove of outpatient work and weren’t ask-
ing themselves, “What will it be like to meet with a patient in my
consulting room?” That’s because, for most of our cohort, this final
year is not only when we continue to hone our outpatient clinical
skills, but also represents the first time we’ll begin to routinely see
our patients (and our colleagues) in person once again.
The COVID-19 pandemic began halfway through our intern year and has defined both our inpatient and outpatient
psychiatry training. As interns and second-year residents, we participated in the pandemic response of our hospital-
based services, continuing to deliver care in-person for the sickest patients. Although the ever-evolving virus was
always in the back of our minds, we were in it together, and there was a palpable camaraderie in our workrooms
and hallways.

During our second-year outpatient rotations at the San Francisco VA, we practiced telepsychiatry for the first time,
within a system that had rapidly expanded its existing telehealth infrastructure to continue safely providing care to
veterans during the height of the pandemic. By the time we started our third year in July 2021 and joined the outpa-
tient clinics at UCSF Langley Porter, the majority of our patients had become quite comfortable with “Zoom” video
visits. At both the VA and Langley Porter, telehealth clearly increased access to mental health care for many pa-
tients across Northern California. Prior to COVID, “telepsychiatry” was a niche field and occasional elective rota-
tion within residency training, but within a few short months, the tables turned. The speed and relative smoothness
of psychiatry’s transition to telehealth remains a praise-worthy accomplishment for our field. Yet we cannot help
but ask ourselves, what was lost?

After more than a year spent in virtual clinics, that question looms large. We are gratified that beyond acquiring
clinical knowledge, we have in fact been able to form true therapeutic alliances and emotional connections with our
patients through telehealth. We’ve also become accustomed to our virtual offices, festooned as they are with careful

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NORTHERN CALIFORNIA PSYCHIATRIC SOCIETY Page 19 July/August 2022