Investigating the efficacy of a whole team, psychologically informed, acute mental health service approach

Abstract

Background: Service user demand and service changes, from hospital based, to community and hospital mix, within acute adult mental health services, focus the need for psychologically informed, holistic, approaches.

Aims: (1) Describe and report feasibility of a psychologically led Intensive Support Programme (ISP) to meet this need. (2) Present results of a pilot evaluation of this programme.

Method: ISP was implemented in four acute mental health services of the Southern Health NHS Trust, available to both inpatient and outpatient acute services. Evaluation of the service one month after data collection, illustrates operation and level of uptake across different professional roles. The programme was evaluated by assessing psychological distress (CORE-10) and confidence in self-management (Mental Health Confidence Scale) of participating service users before and after intervention.

Results: The service evaluation demonstrated extensive roll out of this programme across acute services of an extensive NHS Trust. Repeated measure t-tests demonstrated significant decrease in distress (p < 0.0005) and significant increase in confidence in self-management of mental health (p < 0.0005).

Conclusion: Evaluation shows that ISP can be delivered in routine care in an acute mental health service and results in improvement in self management skills and facilitation of recovery.

Keywords:

• Psychologically informed environment
• formulation
• acute mental health
• inpatient and crisis services

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.