The transition from residential facilities to and from the psychiatric hospital setting is difficult for individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID). In the U.S.A., specialized psychiatric units for individuals with ID are uncommon and this population is usually served in generalized services. Nevertheless, providers of mental health services in the U.S.A. receive little training in their specific needs. Best practices call for coordination of plans between psychiatric units and community agencies, multidisciplinary care plans, staff education and comprehensive discharge planning in order to improve outcomes of psychiatric hospitalization. An inner city psychiatric unit in a major academic medical centre and a community agency providing residential care for individuals with ID cooperated to provide a plan of care for a client with ID both for hospitalization and for discharge leading to improved outcomes.
Recovery is a cornerstone of the federal government's transformation vision for mental health care. Recovery is most often depicted as a process by which people with serious mental illness reengage with activities that create a meaningful existence and a purpose in life. Psychiatric nurses are expected to partner with patients in the recovery process during inpatient treatment. This may prove difficult given the current emphasis on medical models of care and the state of the science in inpatient psychiatric nursing. In this article, the authors describe how magnet forces that focus on empowering nurses, empowering evidence-based care, and strengthening unit-based leadership have the potential for generating transformational change at the point of service. Engaging in the recovery movement within the magnet structure may generate innovations critical to the growth of the specialty. J Am Psychiatr Nurses Assoc, 2008; 14(5), 346-352.
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.