Portugal prepares transfer of psychiatric patients to community units
In 2016, one of the recommendations for 2022, contained in the Evaluation Report of the Mental Health Plan, was already “the creation in all mental health departments of community mental health teams/units, duly qualified to ensure integrated care for people with severe psychiatric disorders”.
But not this is easy was not possible. To the DN, the director of the National Coordination for the area of Mental Health, Miguel Xavier, explains that deinstitutionalization has been suspended again in these four years, because of the pandemic. “The process had to be suspended”, but it has to be “consistently”. Also because, and as highlighted, it is a process of change that integrates that of “international human rights”.
What is deinstitutionalization? Xavier defines: “It is a progressive process of providing mental health care to people with mental illness in institutions from psychiatric hospitals to mental health institutions in the community”. A change that was born approximately 50 years ago and that was publicly driven by the consciential psychotic conditions in the face of the bad ones of closed institutions and by the introduction of the first medicines”.
According to the psychiatrist, over these 50 years, deinstitutionalization has been “one of the pillars of any psychiatric reform, being at an advanced stage of development in most Western industrialized countries”. For example, “Italy was the same process in the following years, which started in the 70s, but the same process started in the following European countries.”
The doctor has not yet underlined that this scientific process has been evaluated, with the results obtained, in general terms, only the economic viability of the process, as, above all, gains in terms of patient autonomy” .
But in Portugal, the move to this stadium has taken place very irregularly, “it is necessary to resume it”, he defended. “The disregarded deinstitutionalization to be considered an imperative from the point of view of human rights, being advocated by all international standards in this area, and is part of the international legal documents on human rights to which Portugal is bound”, he argued.
According to the same 2016 report, Portugal currently had 230 patients for patients in psychiatric hospitals and 220 patients for acute patients. To these were added another 249 beds for hospital residents and 853 for general patients. In all, there are almost 00 beds that aim to protect patients’ protective devices, but they are, precisely, “stay regime in alternative psychiatric facilities for resident people”.
The objective to achieve not the new cases of pathologies is that the new cases of graves have not been admitted psychiatric, but that they can already be treated in community units, thus allowing a greater integration of the patients.
In fact, “the greater integration of the work team, highlighted in the Xavier community, is capable of reinforcing the integration in the community, maintaining the level of integration of a greater person, standing out” this measure “does not come, at first hand, from its impact on population size”, because it is “a reference number of people, the order of application of some terms is small. primacy of human rights to these patients”. In other words, countries, the deinstitutional “can contribute, and as the experience of various rights, reinforcing individual integration and a more effective community in”
Even if other measures are advanced, which will now integrate a reform of Mental Health Portugal, the doctor stops the fact that it is a process of change that “is based on an alert plan and which should be based on an alert plan and the prediction of mechanisms of evaluation”.
At this moment, he said, “the strategic document has already been completed, and it is prepared for the creation of responses in the community, through the Recovery and Resilience Program (PRR), which institutions from various sectors can apply for”. On the other hand, “a specific funding model is also being developed for the provision of care to deinstitutionalized patients, foreseen for the creation of a year”.
In the conversation with the director of Mental Health, the National Coordination for Mental Health, that this change of the great challenges of Mental Health remembers, since this change of the great challenges of Mental Health for the next ten years becomes a change of mentality must be a change of mentality and of necessity: if we want to evolve, mental health has to be considered a priority of political investment”.