Risperidone long-acting injection may have a role to play in the management of older patients with psychotic disorders but further research is required.
The National Mental Health Policy in April 1992 [1] highlighted the need to reform mental health care delivery. The policy suggested that mental health care be restricted to those with a ‘serious mental illness’ and that half of the people with serious mental illnesses were untreated whilst many with less serious illnesses were over-serviced. A key challenge for service reform from the outset was the need to allocate appropriate resources in a manner that reflected the point of care [2]. Several authors suggested that whilst the policy made recommendations regarding the process of reform, little mention was made of the resources required to accomplish such reform and that there was a significant shortfall of manpower [3,4].
The Second National Mental Health Plan [1] has as one of its key themes, a focus on the quality and effectiveness of services with an emphasis on outcomes for consumers and carers. This focus on quality and outcomes results in an increasing interest in clinical practice guidelines, benchmarking of services and the development and evaluation of models of best practice. One way to progress these issues within clinical services is to develop clinical pathways for groups of patients with similar conditions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.