A small number of severely and persistently mentally ill in-patients awaiting residential or long-stay facilities represent an obstacle to the efficient utilization of acute care beds. These facilities are costly and currently reputed to be contrary to recovery principles. In 2013, all acute psychiatric care wards in Montreal identified 194 in-patients who could be discharged to residential or long-term nursing care facilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGoal: Quebec's three mental health university institutes (DMHUI, IUSMM and the IUSMQ) and the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke submitted a statement to the provincial consultation forum on the 2014-2020 Mental Health Action Plan (MHAP), which was held in January 2014 and organized by the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS). This article presents these institutes' main recommendations.
Method: Mental health university institutes deliver a wide and diverse range of services.
Objective: As pressure mounts to reduce the number of costly acute care beds, governments and the literature propose top-down ratios. Is this reasonable and fair to the responsible medical officers who, as the key care providers, will need to admit patients and develop discharge plans in a reduced-beds environment?
Method: Treating physicians of all acute care inpatients on a given day (n = 212) and all new acute care admissions over a 2-week period (n = 125) completed an adapted version of the Nottingham Acute Beds Use Survey (NABUS) Questionnaire.
Results: On a given day, only 62 of 212 inpatients were unsuited for any alternative to acute care hospitalization.