Mental health rehabilitation services in Ireland: vision and reality

The Irish national mental health policy document, A Vision for Change , included recommendations to develop specialist rehabilitation mental health services. This survey was conducted as part of a multicentre study to investigate current provision of mental health rehabilitation services in Ireland and factors associated with better clinical outcomes for users of these services. The aim was to carry out a detailed national survey of specialist rehabilitation services in order to describe current service provision.

A structured questionnaire was sent to consultant rehabilitation psychiatrists in all mental health catchment areas of Ireland that had any rehabilitation services to gather data on various aspects of service provision.

Twenty-six of the 31 mental health areas of Ireland had some form of rehabilitation service. Sixteen teams working in 15 of these areas fulfilled A Vision for Change criteria to be defined as specialist rehabilitation services and all 16 responded to the survey. The overall response rate was 73% (19/26). Most services lacked a full multidisciplinary team. Only one service had an assertive outreach team with acceptable fidelity to the assertive outreach model. Urban services were less well resourced than rural services.

This is the first national survey to describe the provision of mental health rehabilitation services in Ireland. Although there has been an increase in the provision of consultant-led specialist rehabilitation services nationally, these services lack multidisciplinary input. There also appears to be a lack of planned provision of the facilities required to provide comprehensive rehabilitation services with unequal distribution of resources between urban and rural areas. This has potential cost implications for local mental health services in relation to 'out of area treatment' placements and perhaps more importantly to the overall quality of patient care.