Mental health. Refocusing long-term care

How to provide care in the community for clients who are suffering from a long-term mental health problem is a dilemma for mental health service planners and providers. Community psychiatric nurses (CPNs) are the ideally placed profession to provide care for these people according to recent reports and are a part of the multidisciplinary teams. This paper outlines how four CPNs worked in a unidisciplinary team titled the community support teams (CST) in Greenwich, taking secondary referrals exclusively from the psychiatric service and each carrying a small caseload of severely ill clients. The client input of the CST is compared to the generic CPNs' input who provided a standard CPN service to a wide client mix including long-term clients.