home treatment team

assalamualaikum...

it's been three days, at Home Treatment Team, mental health unit, Chase Farm Hospital. So far, things had been interesting. I've involve in home visit with different line of profession, psychologist, nurses, and social workers. before you get more confuse, let me brief a bit on how their mental health system works.

nursing in UK were trained according to 5 areas of specialties: general nursing, peadiatric nursing, maternity nursing, learning disability nursing and lastly, mental health nursing. Every nurses who specialiazed in mental health nursing will soon join the mental health services, governed by National Health Services (NHS). NHS is like KKM in Malaysia.

ok, Mental health services here rarely admit patient in wards, since they had abolished asylums and due to limited number of beds in wards. their system promotes treatment of mentally ill patient in community based. To   do so, teams such as home treatment, primary care treatment and community mental health treatment was set up. I'm still not clear on how different2 unit function, but this is basically how things works there.

the one i'm attached to currently is called home treatment team (HTT). this team is considered as front liner and operate 24/7 and staff works in shift. whenever a patient is sent to mental health unit emergency, regardless new admission or case of relapse, they are considered as 'acutely ill'. HTT's members will perform assessment to decide whether that patient needed to be hospitalised or can be treated at home. when they decide NOT to hospitalised that patient, then their roles begin.

they will start by assessing the patient at home or at hospital or primary care center, and determine plan of care (i.e: identification of problem, frequency of visit, medication, social needs and etc.). Their intervention only applies during acute phase, and ended when patient was able to engage with reality and comply with treatment, usually for 4 to 6 weeks. then, the HTT responsibility terminates when patient is assigned under care coordinator, under their respective GP.  erm..still not clear whether GP chose the care coordinator or vice versa.

anyhow, still got time to learn...till then~~~