Improved Community Care of Family with Person Having Mental Illness - Enhanced Collaboration Between United Christian Hospital and Social Welfare Department

Abstract Description

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Authors (including presenting author) :

SZETO, WL(1), YIU, GCM (1), TSANG, LW (1), NG, HY (1)

Affiliation :

(1) Department of Psychiatry, United Christian Hospital, (2) Social Welfare Department

Introduction :

During a meeting of District Task Group on Community Mental Health Support Services (DTG Meeting) between Hospital Authority (HA) and Social Welfare Department for supporting community mental health services, social workers of Integrated Family Service Centre (IFSC) requested for additional clinical support and advices for caring of family with person having mental illness while there is no formal case discussion platform across the whole territory. Through work re-engineering and without additional resources, a formal 4-monthly case conference chaired by Community Psychiatric Services (CPS) of Department of Psychiatry, United Christian Hospital (UCH) involving all Kwun Tong District IFSCs has been started from June 2017. Cases to be discussed are those patients who are residing at Kwun Tong District and are out-patients of psychiatric out-patient clinics under UCH. This initiative has also been extended to cases residing at Tseung Kwan O District and thus all IFSCs of Kowloon East Cluster (KEC) were invited starting from the 5th Meeting in October 2018.

Objectives :

(1)With additional information from IFSCs, HA will get the full clinical picture of patient concerned and personalized care plan can be developed for better clinical management. (2)Through timely exchange of opinions and suggestions between caring parties, improved clinical care is expected.

Methodology :

Arrangement and outcome of the case conference is monitored and evaluated each time before and after the meeting. CPS team aimed to achieve better quality care and result, thus a formal evaluation through collecting feedback after the 5th conference by returning an evaluation form was conducted.

Result & Outcome :

100 % return rate of evaluation form yielded an average of 5.3 out of full score of 6 on the overall effectiveness of the case conference. Social workers of IFSCs found the formal platform was very useful in their daily clinical management. The evaluation result was presented at the DTG Meeting in November 2018 with appreciation and positive feedback received. CPS of other HA cluster started exploring the feasibility of holding such case conference at respective cluster when witnessing the remarkable outcome of Kowloon East Cluster.