Dr Rahul Gupta

Dr. Rahul Gupta is a Senior Staff psychiatrist with Hunter New England Mental Health Service and a Conjoint Lecturer at University of Newcastle, Australia. He did his Fellowship of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) in 2006 and has worked in senior roles in the MH Service. He has broad interest in Digital Health & in particular in Telehealth. He gained CHIA certification in 2021 from Australian Institute of Digital Health (AIDH). Rahul is currently the Clinical Lead in the innovative Telepsychiatry Project called the Northern Mental Health Emergency Care – Rural Access Program (NMHEC-RAP) funded by the NSW Ministry of Health. The Service commenced on Aug 2016 and is based on a hub and spoke telehealth model aiming to reduce the inequity of access to specialist mental health (MH) service in rural EDs of northern NSW. In addition to providing leadership in clinical matters, he along with other team leaders have evolved the operational guidelines, model of care and implemented the telehealth service in varied geographical sites across 3 LHDs. During the Covid pandemic, he was a member of Covid response working groups of NSW Health. Some of his telehealth guidelines and models of care are published by Agency of Clinical Innovation (ACI) as exemplar models. Rahul also works part time at an intermediate stay psychiatric rehabilitation service where he looks after patient with chronic and treatment resistant conditions in a recovery-oriented framework. He has set up the psychiatry training term in Telepsychiatry and successfully got it accredited by RANZCP – the first in Australia. He is a Conjoint Lecturer with University of Newcastle where he is involved in medical education, teaching, and review of UG curriculum in mental health and digital health. He is an examiner for both UG and PG students. Rahul has done many conference presentations on Telehealth and Digital Health. He has done clinical research on virtual care and digital health. His recent publications are on factors affecting the acceptability of virtual care and online patient self-report for MH triage and assessment.