Psychiatric Bulletin (2001) 25: 364. doi: 10.1192/pb.25.9.364-a
© 2001 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Psychiatric Bulletin (2001) 25: 364
© 2001 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Community Care
Council Report CR86 £7.50. 64 pp.
Professor T Burns, Working Group Chairman
This new Council Report replaces the College's previous position on
community care, Caring for a Community, published in 1994 (CR36). Its
aim is to summarise the College's views on the core components of humane and
effective community care for adults of working age with mental illness. It
reflects the significant changes in the UK context over that time both
the increasingly critical stand taken by some politicians and interest groups,
and the welcome emphasis on clinical governance and evidence-based practice
enshrined in the recent National Service Framework (NSF). This report has
evolved alongside the NSF, and covers much of the same ground. Some of the
terminology will have changed but we have retained terms (such as keyworker
instead of care coordinator) that were in current use during our
deliberations. It does not deal with issues of training or workforce planning
because these are considered elsewhere.
We have tried to strike a balance between being comprehensive and being
focused. Colleagues have told us that they would like some concrete figures
and proposals to work around, both to aim at and to use in local discussions.
This has inevitably involved judgement and selectivity about the content. Not
all these judgements can be supported by research findings but we have
consulted widely. Despite the prescriptive style of some of these suggestions
they in no way deny the importance of local circumstances or the need for
local sensitivities and adjustments.
This is a clinically-led document. We believe that psychiatry, working
closely with our partners (members of the wider multi-professional mental
health team, social services and the users of the service and carers), should
take an active lead in the continuing development of community services. We
should neither back off from them nor adopt a reactive stand to externally
driven policy.