Reinvigorating community mental health care
It's worth looking at the article by Peter Tyrer in The Psychiatrist on community psychiatry in the context of today's report from BBC News and Community Care about what they call the crisis in mental health care. To quote from Peter's article:-
The general mantra of ‘community psychiatry good, hospital psychiatry bad’ has … led to the neglect of the proper function of in-patient care, a combination of asylum and rehabilitation. …[A] fundamental wish to improve patients’ autonomy is being removed by an overbureaucratised system of community care that is obsessed by risk, and in danger of promoting greater institutionalisation by a complex regulatory framework that denies the flexibility that is essential to good community psychiatric practice.
Where in the UK community psychiatry used to be flexible, adventurous, creative and bold, with the many changes imposed from policy managers in recent years it has become constricted, controlled, limiting and self-serving. Autonomy for practitioners has almost entirely disappeared and been replaced by a rigid system of care that leads to patients encountering a bewildering number of health professionals, who carry out specific regimented tasks but who rarely have the chance to develop meaningful relationships with the people they treat.
His solution is to remind ourselves of the core principles of good care:-
- if good facilities are available for patients to be treated outside hospital, they should be used as much as possible;
- if a hospital bed is necessary it should be available when required and should be as close as possible to the patient’s home; hospital should be able to serve as a place of refuge and respite as well as a treatment centre;
- continuity of care may not always be possible but should be striven for as a matter of principle, and all community teams should stay in touch with their patients no matter where they are placed;
- individual or team-based treatment both have merits and their choice should be determined in collaboration with the patient and his or her carers, and maintained irrespective of treatment setting.
He goes on:-
This can only be achieved by allowing greater autonomy within teams to maintain priorities, reducing the size of the catchment area for each team so that they do not become overwhelmed and depersonalised in their attitudes.... [M]orale [needs to be raised] of a service that has been relegated to the backwaters of care for too long.
Sure, it "can be treated with therapy and medication" but, in practice, that means just medication. For many people, that kind of treatment is a disaster.
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