Mental health services--maintaining strategic direction

AIM AND KEY ISSUES: This article reviews the theoretical basis of strategic management in an attempt to provide managers with a better understanding of the underpinning concepts and consequent actions they need to take to avoid loss of control and ultimate failure.

The authors argue that community care for the severely mentally ill is failing and that in part the reason for this perceived failure is a closer allegiance to primary care that has shifted the focus away from mental illness. Such a shift, coupled with poor management and a desire by Community Mental Health Nurses (CMHNs) to retain a broad focus and maintain the 'autonomy' they gain when not held in the gravitational grasp of Consultant Psychiatrists, has resulted in strategic drift. The authors suggest 10 possible reasons to explain why CMHNs currently fail to meet the needs of the severely mentally ill. Among these are a lack of explicit strategic implementation plans, professional ambivalence and self-interest, poor management of resources and conflicting demands from key interest groups.

It seems that mental health services in this country have reached the point where resistance to change should be crumbling in the face of perceived failure to deliver the required services. Whilst it could be argued that a major and potent source of internal change is performance gaps, few things force change more than sudden and unexpected information about poor organizational performance.