Mental Health Crisis in the A and E: Could a sensory approach improve the management and quality outcomes for the service user?
New Zealand has an economy that has remained relatively unaffected in the current worldwide recession.
Spending on health there is predominantly a private industry and as such is driven by market forces and competition. In such an environment, where service users are customers, one would expect that to be a market leader the provision of your services needs to be of a quality standard customers wish to receive.
The Florence Nightingale Travel scholarship was accessed in order to be able to examine this concept within the mental health services in New Zealand as one would expect to see advances in new techniques as a result of the desire to be a market leader and offer a good quality product.
The scholarship also supported the ability to understand how the market competition system fits with a service user group who become customers of this service but who may not wish to be such.
New Zealand also has a very diverse population, with immigration rates high, as well as the indigenous Maori population, Asian and other local populations all influencing the service delivery model. The scholarship would enable the exploration of such diversity on service delivery with a view to transferability of any good practice ideas back to the UK
Achieving the scholarship enabled me to travel to New Zealand as this country is the current leader in techniques such as sensory modulation. New Zealand is also the current centre for the emerging concept of the use of these techniques within mental health services and is developing an evidence base for the reduction in the use of restraint, violent incidents, use of additional medication and seclusion in the mental health crisis.
Despite this, New Zealand still has the highest suicide rate in the world.
The following report highlights the background to my interest in the mental health service user in a crisis within the urgent care pathway and how the management of such presentations is hoped to be improved through the use of such new techniques as sensory modulation. The report also explores the background to the use of A and E for mental health crisis/urgent care presentations, the challenges this environment can bring and the exploration of the use of sensory modulation as a proposed technique, in such presentations, to improve the quality experienced by such service users.
The report highlights details of my trip taken to New Zealand as a result of attaining a Florence Nightingale Travel scholarship supported by the Sandra Charitable Trust. The report discusses the placements experienced in New Zealand, best practice ideas learnt and new discoveries gained in relation to the management of mental health and well being in a culture that has surprisingly vast differences as well as many similarities.
The report concludes with planned recommendations and ideas gained as a direct result of the scholarship and how the lessons learnt and best practice ideas gleaned from the trip will help to inform practice here in the UK to improve the quality of the service users in the urgent care pathway in a mental health crisis.