Publications by authors named "Ravindra Agrawal"

Objectives: Strict social distancing and lockdown measures imposed to curb transmission during the early phase of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to people's psychological wellbeing, limited access to social support, and disrupted routine mental health service delivery. In response, a consortium of mental health stakeholders from Goa, India launched the COVIDAV program, which provided pro-bono virtual psychiatric and counselling consultations across India through an online platform. This study describes the acceptability and feasibility of the program from the perspective of various stakeholders.

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Measurement-based peer supervision is one strategy to assure the quality of psychological treatments delivered by non-mental health specialist providers. In this formative study, we aimed to 1) describe the development and 2) examine the acceptability and feasibility of PEERS (Promoting Effective mental healthcare through peER Supervision)-a novel smartphone app that aims to facilitate registering and scheduling patients, collecting patient outcomes, rating therapy quality and assessing supervision quality-among frontline treatment providers delivering behavioral activation treatment for depression. The PEERS prototype was developed and tested in 2021, and version 1 was launched in 2022.

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Technology-enabled interventions are often recommended to overcome geographical barriers to access and inequitable distribution of mental healthcare workers. The aim of this study was to examine the acceptability and feasibility of an assisted telepsychiatry model implemented in primary care settings in India. In-depth interviews were conducted with patients who received telepsychiatry consultations.

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Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the needs for care of persons with mental illness remained largely unmet worldwide, testifying to the inadequacy of current approaches to mental health care and their unsuitability for the rising demand. One hurdle to improved access to quality care is the reliance on expensive specialist providers, particularly for the delivery of psychosocial interventions. This article describes EMPOWER, a not-for-profit program that builds on the clinical science demonstrating the effectiveness of brief psychosocial interventions for a range of psychiatric conditions; implementation science demonstrating the effectiveness of delivery of these interventions by non-specialist providers (NSPs); and pedagogical science demonstrating the effectiveness of digital approaches for training and quality assurance.

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Background: Tele-psychiatry is an increasingly acceptable and feasible platform to deliver mental health care with the potential to increase access to care in low-resource settings. We aim to examine the acceptability and preliminary impact of the delivery of assisted tele-psychiatry services in primary healthcare settings in Goa, India.

Methods: Before-after uncontrolled treatment cohort study.

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Objectives: To investigate the presence of different forms of experiences of discrimination in the medical workplace.

Methods: A total of 526 questionnaires were sent out, including a demographic survey form and the Everyday Discrimination Scale.

Results: Experiences of being "treated with less courtesy than other people are" and feeling as "others acted if they're better than [me]" were reported as having occurred with almost daily frequency by 4.

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Hematological abnormalities are frequent among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients and may be directly attributable to the virus or may be caused by opportunistic infections, neoplasms or drugs that cause bone marrow suppression or hemolysis. Pure red cell aplasia (PRCA) is an uncommon hematological disorder that causes anemia. We report a 37-year-old male with HIV infection who developed PRCA 6 weeks after commencing Zidovudine and recovered following cessation of the drug.

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