IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON PSYCHOLOGICAL & BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SERVICES
Between April 14 and May 8, MHS circulated a Pulse Survey to our customers and networks via email, our website, and various list-servs to better understand the impact COVID-19 has had on psychological services. We recognize that understanding the impact of this pandemic is important to the field as a whole and we’d like to share some of the insights we uncovered.
We ran into some limitations
We were not able to respond to everything but wanted to let you know we heard you on two important fronts:
There were calls for remote at-home administration norms development, but norms development is very time consuming and may not be what is actually needed. We don’t necessarily want to collect norms that are pandemic specific, as they would have little value beyond current circumstances and are anything but normal. What is needed are validation studies looking at whether in-person is comparable to remote administration and this will happen over-time.
Unfortunately, we were not able to provide options for some of our more sensitive tests (TOMM) or tests that require ms level reaction time accuracy (Conners CPT 3/CATA) despite the voiced need. We are working to complete the TOMM 2, which will be available in a digital format, but progress has been interrupted due to the pandemic.
We also did have, before the pandemic, an online version of Conners CPT 3 in the pipeline. The program would be accessed online but the ms reaction time responses would be captured locally. We are working as quickly as we can to develop and test this solution, but don’t currently have an ETA for release.