Current issues in providing primary medical care to people with serious mental illness

This article explores some of the current issues in providing primary care for people with serious mental illness. In contrast to many patients in the United States, up to half of patients with serious mental illness in the United Kingdom are seen only by the primary care team. However many General Practitioners feel that the care of this patient group is beyond their remit. In the United Kingdom during the last decade, there have been a variety of policy initiatives, influenced by the generic principle of "partnership working" and the increasing recognition of the importance of patient choice, that have aimed to increase the role of primary care in the delivery of health care to people with serious mental illness. On the ground, these policy imperatives have been realised through different models of shared care and schemes to encourage better communication across the primary/secondary interface. Most recently, and perhaps most effectively, the introduction of a type of performance related pay into primary care may lead to changes to the way in which General Practitioners think and act in terms of their roles and responsibilities with this patient group. Theoretically, therefore the United Kingdom may be entering a new "golden age" of primary care based mental health services for people with serious mental illness, where holistic care, preventive care and health promotion are increasingly seen not as the gold standard, but the norm.