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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Service innovation
— an old age liaison psychiatry service | | Author(s) | Paul Whelan, Kirsten Lawson, Stephen W Burton |
| Journal title | Psychiatric Bulletin, vol 31, no 4, April 2007 |
| Pages | pp 145-147 |
| Source | http://pb.rcpsych.org |
| Keywords | Psychiatric treatment ; Hospital services ; Referrals ; Evaluation ; Lewisham. |
| Annotation | Service models differ for provision of mental health care for older medical in-patients, ranging from psychiatry services based on liaison to those based on a consultation model. The Lewisham Old Age Consultation and Liaison (LOACaL) psychiatry service was set up in November 2003 to serve four older people's care wards at University Hospital Lewisham. Older medical in-patients were seen prior to this as part of an 'in-reach' sector team-based service provided by two old age community mental health teams (CMHTs). The new service comprised a consultation psychiatrist (5 sessions), a staff grade doctor (10 sessions), a psychologist (3 session) and a nurse (3 sessions). Of 550 beds at the hospital, 124 are for care of older people. In 2004-2005, there were 56300 admissions to the hospital as a whole and the average length of stay on an older people's care ward was 2 weeks. Mujic et al (Psychiatric Bulletin, vol 28, no 5, 2004) found that capacity assessments represented a fifth of the workload on an ald age liaison service. In an attempt to reduce the number of inappropriate referrals for simple capacity assessments, the new service's referral form had guidelines for assessing capacity printed on the back. The aims of this study were to determine the quantity and type of referrals to the new old age liaison psychiatry service, to assess the quality of the referral information provided by the care teams and their response to recommendations made by the liaison team, to assess the response time of the liaison service, and the outcomes of the patients seen, to assess the adequacy of of the new service's referral form and record the number of capacity referrals. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-070510226 A |
| Classmark | LP: LD: L5R: 4C: 82LO |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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