Members of a community mental health team

The management of change in a community mental health team.

Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is the most widely studied and well supported evidence based community management model for persons with severe mental illness (SMI) in the mental health literature. This report details the replacement of an unevaluated generic model of case management with ACT in a metropolitan inner city area. This is work in progress and detailed patient outcomes are not y...

Prioritising referrals to a community mental health team.

BACKGROUND Current national policies encourage prioritisation of people with severe mental illness (SMI) as well as the development of a primary care-led National Health Service. Where resources for mental health are limited, there is a potential conflict between the needs of people with SMI and the much more common depressive and anxiety disorders that form the bulk of the mental health worklo...

Reducing non-attendance rates in a community mental health team

The project aimed to improve productivity of psychiatric out patient clinic using quality improvement techniques through "Listening Into Action", a national programme designed to engage and support front-line clinicians to make improvements to patient care. We identified reasons as to why our patients missed appointments and then introduced a system to reduce "did not attend" (DNA) rates. Non-a...

Risk Assessment in Mental Health: Introducing a Traffic Light System in a Community Mental Health Team

AIMS To reports a study in which action research approach was utilised to introduce a new system of risk assessment, based on traffic lights, into a community mental health team. BACKGROUND Risk management is a serious concern in community mental healthcare where there is less direct, real-time supervision of clients than in other settings, and because inadequate management of risk can have f...

Boring but important: the community mental health team.