In her debut blog, Sophia Pillai looks at a recent retrospective case-cohort study on patient and service-level factors affecting the length of inpatient stay in an acute mental health service.
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Mark Smith channels Ella Fitzgerald whilst reviewing evidence from the 2nd UK National Audit of psychological therapies, which compares CBT and generic counselling in the treatment of depression.
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Russell Woolgar summarises a study of family contact during out of area placements for patients in a specialist forensic intellectual disability service.
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Jennifer Lane considers this retrospective audit which examined current practice in the US to discover the current trends in treatment of proximal humerus fractures.
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André Tomlin summarises the second National Audit of Schizophrenia, which highlights that many people with schizophrenia are still not getting the high quality psychological and medical treatment they deserve.
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Anti-psychotic medications comprise between 30–50% of all psychotropics prescribed for people with learning disabilities. One of the potential side effects is metabolic syndrome (a group of risk factors that occur together and increase the risk for coronary artery disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes in people with learning disabilities who have been prescribed antipsychotic medication.) [read the full story…]
Community Treatments Orders (CTOs) were introduced to enable people who had been detained under certain sections of the Mental Health Act 1983 to be discharged from the hospital and treated in the community. The supervising doctor however retains the power to recall that person to hospital if necessary The majority of studies into the use [read the full story…]
Making the decision to consent to medical treatment requires access to information, presented in clear and understandable ways. There is evidence that that people with learning disabilities do not always understand information about medications they are prescribed, for example from the medication matters project carried out at the Norah Fry centre which produced a series of [read the full story…]
Panoramic radiographs are regularly used in dental practice and a number of studies have highlighted that the quality of these films is often less the optimal.T he aim of this trial was to assess the value of a quality improvement programme for panoramic radiography. 40 volunteer dental practices were randomly allocated to active (n=20) [read the full story…]
Back in 2010, NICE published an updated edition of their schizophrenia guideline, to guide the treatment and management of patients with schizophrenia in primary and secondary care. The National Schizophrenia Audit is a new initiative led by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and involving 8 other partner organisations including various professional membership organisations and 2 [read the full story…]
