The Characteristics of Consumers Receiving Case Management in the Community: A Review of Literature

Abstract

Mental health nurses increasingly provide care for consumers in the community who once would have received treatment in psychiatric inpatient units. The purpose of this review is to determine the characteristics of these consumers. We searched electronic databases and obtained information on some of the characteristics of community mental health consumers. For some nurses, over half of their caseloads are consumers with schizophrenia. Up to about one-third of consumers may be involuntary, but this proportion varies considerably. Impairments of health and social functioning appear common among consumers of community mental health services. This study identifies the need for greater interrogation of national databases to enhance understanding of community caseloads.

Mental health professionals’ experiences of working with parents with psychosis and their families: a qualitative study

“…Patients with psychosis make up over half of the service users in a community mental health team [1] and over a third of individuals with psychosis are a parent [2][3][4]. These parents are more likely than the general population to live alone [5], be unemployed [6] and require social service intervention [7,8].…”

“…This paper aims to: (1) understand the needs of parents with psychosis and their families from a service-level perspective; (2) explore the barriers that mental health professionals face when working to meet these needs. We used qualitative methods in order to explore the perspectives of mental health professionals and combined the viewpoints from two different kinds of mental health service.…”