... for carers, particularly family carers .... [ ! come out of hiding, that will get you nowhere .... ] a web site to give voice to those who can't, and don't, voice for themselves
The site is edited by a retired consultant psychiatrist who has looked after a family member at home, affected by schizophrenia, for the last fifteen years.
For website beginners, clicking with the mouse on a highlit item e.g Care Programme Approach [ CPA } will take you to the appropriate page. You return to the Home Page by clicking on the back arrow button at the top of your internet page, or try pressing the back button on your keyboard, or there is usually a return highlight link at the bottom of the pageIf nothing else you must learn, understand, and address
1.
breaks within the week
If you are a family carer and there are not breaks from caring within the week on a regular and sufficient basis then you have
2.
UNMET NEEDS
and your 'cared for' has unmet occupational activities that would stabilise their lives.
3.the CPA is the mechanism for getting them addressed; ask to get in at the first Needs Assessment stageyou carers must know about this Care Programme Approach - the four stage process for delivering mental health services.
The updated Care Programme Approach4.
a specialist rehabilitation team with a consultant lead, is the team with sufficient authority, to build up the experience of finding out, building, and connecting to the activity resources in the local area, so as to be able to deliver meaningful 'breaks in the week' .5.
Carer Assessment provision as the second-line of defence to get the UNMET needs into the system of delivery.6.
Finally the Care Quality Commission [CQC] - combines - [ no, wish it did for mental health service ] - does both Inspections, usually annually - but separately - the NHS Inspection service and the LA Social Service Inspections [ an example of their work ... the NEWS link at the top their front page gives you the West London and Broadmoor NHS Inspection Report ]
Note the contact link to the the way they want you to be involved in Health Trust visits and Reviews. You can ask them when they are coming to inspect your local area Mental Health Trust.
Then you can write to them beforehand, and bring up the lack of a Rehabilitation service for aftercare in your area; or ask to be interviewed by them when they visit:- the local contact routeCQC inspect the local Social Services as well - but separately - really for mental health services they should do both together.
E-mail re action is welcome .... and necessary ... mica2@tiscali.co.uk
*** !!! NEW Inquiry Bryan It was their choice more unsettling news Latest July 2009 National Confidential Enquiry into Suicide and Homicide [ on their front page - go to 'latest news' top right ] Homicide annual rate by schizophrenia sufferers is up. But the Reports of the service on offer when a perpetrator was supposed to be being helped within secondary NHS care, show up hardly much better in keeping people in touch with service . Look at this this:- Local London 18 September Inquiries... into Care and Treatment after Homicide The source material for the recorded increase comes from the psychiatric reports to the Courts. The figures are sufficiently alarming for there to be an immediate examination as in the Confidential Inquiry. of the psychiatric Reports to the Courts for one more recent year - say, 2008, the year before Compulsory Treatment Orders came into effect It can be done quickly by the same people, just for those by people with schizophrenia. That body that did not greatly demur when a member wrote in that schizophrenia was no longer the 'heartland' of Psychiatry. Plenty of research into genes and brains; little into the practice in keeping a lead and a hold towards the provision of a 'life' for those with this continuing illness: 'sticky' management that keeps an eye on those with vulnerability in residual illness. The old activities available on the mental hospital campus grounds for the long-term ill are lost to them. There should be a Rehabilitation service in every Trust area
*** !!! NEW CTO 2000 Community Treatment Orders in the first year. A professional comment at the introduction of the new MH Act about the effect on family carers If there is no resource, available, to take them into an acceptable active routine, for self care and occupational engagement then what does the supervision and authority bring to bear on their situation. Why a specialist service is a necessity to improve the connections of the enduring but unvocal troubled and inactive. ... it is who gets their way to the water hole first - the Layard Cognitive Behaviour Treatment, conditions, vocal, well connected, and numerous, with problems that are passing, with the help of friends and relatives till they pass; or the worst off, with permanent hardships who, if not protected, find the water gone, or what is left muddied by the careless splashing of the active !! ? Rehabilitation ?
*** National Institute of Clinical Excellence New Horizons ...link to consultation form Carers Week survey aCarers Strategy One Year On *** !!!NEW !!! ... There is a new NHS Inspectorate,
This is what the MHC used Note the absence of any indication tell the new body that you carers are not *** !!!NEW !!! ... Comparitive mental spend per person: *** !!! e.g.
*** !!! If you are internet and Items marked red are new or retain importance !!! the quandaries facing the professional services. | B | *** a good website updates news on schizophrenia *** !!! NEW Is memory difficulty the disability ? Three studies a man twenty years on with long-term schizophrenia, now well settled to a routine, describes a difficulty that continues.
This is an experimental study with the same conclusion These are important observations, to be born in mind and acted on when people with research grants do brain studies. They may point to a general fault in this condition. This website would like to see a comment from those so involved in brain imaging studies . in fact comments from anybody living in the world affected by schizophrenia ! about anything on this website. "We all like to have anchor points of certainty in our lives, and even in psychiatry, with its whirlpools and eddies of doubt, we are searching for reminders that some fundamentals remain unchanged. The trouble is that relatively few are left [.,,,, a lead word from the world of the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry ] ,,, ' shame that he does not connect this thought to helping the sufferers from schizophrenia, who flounder without any such future anchor points in the the chaotic lives in their days, and weeks, ahead.
does a sufferer rebuild the internal brain networking, holding the networks together, so that they stay consolidated, together in the mind, matching up the necessary backing associations to support the continuing involvement in outside activities. Sufferers cannot organise or bring themselves to engage in such a routine without help, a lead mentor, some form of oversight, sometimes a degree of coercion at introduction Only a Rehabilitation service which has built up local contacts,is able to set up such a regularity of engagement , can provide the mentoring to set up and sustain such a routine. *** !!!Only half Mental Health Trusts have a co-ordinated RehabilitationService
'Breaks ' from caring within the week are an essential part of aftercare: they can be measured . Establish the lack of 'activity breaks' in the week, and you have a measure of missing aftercare needs for carers and sufferers. 1. Would it be helpful to you in your care situation, if there were breaks within the week where the person you cared for was out doing something on a regular weekly timetable ? If they won't include that question then you invert it and give the information yourself ... what would be helpful, indeed necessary , to me and my family member, in our care situation is to have such breaks, within the week, regularly 2. What breaks of this kind did you ( did I - if necessary ) have in the last week - if that was a typical week ? - over the last month ? .. would be one measurement. 3.
The Government has consulted on regulations relating to these two changes. New 1. Direct payments when capacity is lacking. Consultation on direct payments regulations, Department of Health, 19th August 2008 The Health and Social Care Act 2008 extends the availability of direct payments to those people who lack the capacity to consent to their receipt. who are subject to various provisions of mental health legislation in light of the modernisation of mental health law brought about by the Mental Health Act 2007. New 2. deprivation of Liberty protection [ DOLS ] summary DOLS Guidance .... the Offical advice
Not so new ..... into the NHS mental health services ... click on ....The patient [ and carer ] journey through illness ... violence in schizophrenia down to street drugs ? The claimed for better 'recovery' in third world countries is unexplained and is not capable of being learned from
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*** !!!What are the lessons - that are not learnt
*** !!!
One piece of information from the Inquiries, where the perpetrator suffered fom schizophrenia, is that very few have been helped into a daily and weekly routine of engagement with a meaningful programme of activity, so that they will want to continue with medication
It's a common finding for most of those suffering from schizophrenia, and it is a failure of NHS provision to deliver a Treatment programme in aftercare.
Only half of the Mental Health Trusts have a Rehabilitation service which includes a consultant psychiatrist [ sometimes called 'Recovery' ] - that is, a team dealing with after-care separate from the community mental health team ( they get the first referrals ), a Home Treatment team ( often the old crisis team ) or the Assertive Outreach Teams.
These have responded and the replies are half and half, yes and no.
the No people here, so that you can check the service in your area.
And Complain!!
E-mail reaction is welcome