Community Based Mental Health Treatment Setting - Essay Example

"Community Based Mental Health Treatment Setting" is a delightful example of a paper on the health system.
Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams are dedicated mobile outreach dealing for patients with more disabling mental disorders. They assist in decreasing hospital admissions as well as an inpatient. It also helps in enhancing patient gratification of services offered. Early intervention teams conversely are critical in identifying treatment of early and initial psychotic conditions. Furthermore, Alternatives to acuter inpatient care have been developed in acute hospitals, crisis houses, and home cures. This offer cures for those with severe psychiatric problems, as an alternative to inpatient admission (Hunt, 2008).

The challenges

Numerous social, health care, and economic factors have contributed to the desire to create community networks. Concepts have been established to emphasize collaborative initiatives, patient gratification, and rewards for decreasing the duration of stay while enhancing the superiority of care. People with mental illness will be dynamically treated through community and caregiver interventions.  There are several challenges that arise due to the transition from inpatient to a community setting. They involve transportation barriers, environment access, financial resources, and attitudes (Allender, Rector, and Warner, 2009).

The increase in health care costs has led to shorter stays and the rise of outpatient and outreach services with mental health tribulations that require long term care. This is because the patients would not afford to pay for the bills for longer hospital stay periods.

Clinical uncertainty has been a big challenge in the transition. It causes patients and their families to be anxious and raises frustrations. The transition of this setting has led to concerns for responsibility, client independence, and discretion limit of information. People are skeptical of exposing mental health patients to the wider community as they do not want their responsibility to be open. Another challenge caused by the transition is that clients come to the society without identifying their wants, proficiency, and interests sufficiently and accurately (Allender, Rector, and Warner, 2009).

Nursing Intervention

For a mental patient to recover fully, it is imperative that the nurses are involved in the recovery process of the patient. Nurses play a major role in the recovery of patients in that they prepare the patients to be assimilated back into society. In community nursing of mental patients, untrained people may take part in the recovery process of the patients. The nurses, with their wealth of knowledge, are invaluable in aiding in the recovery of mental patients. The nurses need to intervene in the process to make sure that the community is conversant with the knowledge needed in the recovery process. The nurses through training should assist the community in gaining the needed knowledge to empower the community to take care of mental patients. The nurses should also take part in counseling to ensure that it becomes easy for them to be assimilated back into the community (Harkensss and Demarco, 2009).

Assisted Outpatient Treatment Vs Assertive Community Treatment

AOT came about because of the passage of a law that allowed patients with mental illnesses to take part in community activities. This was put in place in order to reduce cases of crime related to mental illness, suicidal attempts, and much more negative.  ACT on the other hand was introduced to address the needs of the mental patients that the medical institutions were not suited to cover.

Role of a national alliance of the mentally ill (NAMI)

This non-profit organization is mandated to advocate for the rights of the individuals affected with mental illnesses. The organization strives to ensure that the people affected with mental illness are fairly treated and are accepted by society as a part of it. They also take part in activities that positively affect this special group by creating social awareness on the problems involving individuals with mental illness (Hunt, 2008).