The Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Kaduna has officially launched a telepsychiatry service, allowing patients to consult specialists directly from home without traveling long distances.
The new digital platform allows patients to schedule appointments, grant consent, pay fees, and receive consultations online. It aims to eliminate heavy costs on transportation, feeding, and lodging for families who previously traveled from distant parts of Nigeria and neighboring countries for follow-up visits.
The system, rather than just connecting a patient to a doctor, links patients with a full multidisciplinary care team of nurses, pharmacists, laboratory scientists, health information managers, and administrative staff, all integrated into the platform to manage care end-to-end.
Along with the virtual consultation service, the hospital introduced new digital patient cards to improve patient identification, tracking, and medical record management.
Speaking at the media launch in Kaduna, the Medical Director of the hospital, Prof. Aishatu Armaya’u, explained that the goal is to make specialist mental healthcare affordable and available within local communities.
“This is my dream in the next 20 years, to see the impact of what we have done today transferred across the globe, where a patient can stay in the hospital to have affordable, available and accessible mental healthcare at home”, Armaya’u.
She emphasized that virtual appointments will not replace in-person visits entirely and that patients who require physical examinations will still visit the facility, but routine check-ups can now happen virtually.
The hospital plans to integrate its telemedicine platform with primary healthcare centers across Kaduna State. This setup will allow local health centers to handle minor cases with remote guidance from specialists, freeing up hospital doctors to focus on research, training, and complex psychiatric cases.
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