Carers are integral to health care improvement. This report highlights evidence that shows “the economic value of the contribution they make is £119bn per year”. However, without support, carers can feel isolated, depressed, and may be living in poor financial circumstances, which can lead to poor health for the carer too. The problem health and [read the full story…]
The successful transition from inpatient to outpatient psychiatric care is an important step along the road to recovery. It can be a difficult and turbulent time for patients, so much so that there is a risk that patients will suffer a relapse of their illness and need to be readmitted into hospital (Herman, Mattke, Somekh [read the full story…]
Good mental health care should involve the patient in determining their treatment, and should involve the least restrictive form of care possible. Although the Care Programme Approach (CPA) has resulted in patients in England routinely participating in planning their care, compulsory admissions to psychiatric hospitals have continued to rise over the past decade. Involuntary treatment [read the full story…]
Last September I blogged about a cohort study in the Lancet that highlighted the links between self-harm and poor physical health. This same dataset (drawn from over 30,000 patients from 6 hospitals in Oxford, Manchester and Derby from 2000-7) has now spawned a longitudinal study published in the European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal. This [read the full story…]
Mind have published a number of resources aimed at improving mental health crisis care, which they say is ‘under-resourced, understaffed and overstreched’. The charity have used Freedom of Information requests to obtain data from mental health trusts, have conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 patients and are also involved in a research project with colleges [read the full story…]
The NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre have published their annual report on drug misuse in adults and children, which this year includes a focus on young adults. Headlines from the report include a 58% rise in hospital admissions for drug poisoning in the last 11 years, and a 23% fall in admissions for drug-related mental [read the full story…]
‘Crisis intervention’ and ‘home-care packages’ are provided in the community to help people who are going through an acute phase of severe mental illness. The Cochrane Schizophrenia Group have updated their review on this topic by conducting their usual robust and systematic search for randomised controlled trials of crisis intervention models versus standard care for [read the full story…]
Following on from the recent publication of the DH Atlas of Variation in Healthcare, Right Care have now released the equivalent atlas for children and young people. The document and the online interactive atlas present variations across the breadth of child health services provided by NHS England. The aim is to highlight unwarranted variations that [read the full story…]
This fifth annual report on NHS adult specialist mental health services in England and the people who use them covers five years with the most recent information for 2010/11. It covers hospital care and services delivered in the community. This year, for the first time, data from a small number of NHS funded independent sector [read the full story…]
This ecological analysis published in the BMJ examines the rise in the rate of involuntary admissions for mental illness in England that has occurred as community alternatives to hospital admission have been introduced. The study used available data on provision of beds for people with mental illness in the NHS from Hospital Activity Statistics and involuntary [read the full story…]
