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Depot injections in the community

Sir: In his letter on mirror-image studies (Psychiatric Bulletin, April 2002, 26, 155), Professor Hugh Freeman draws attention to the early days of giving depot injections in the community, and says, quite rightly, that this practice coincided with the birth of community psychiatric nursing.

Although he mentions the early 1970s as the date of this type of service being given, we, at Herrison Hospital, Dorchester, and St Ann's Hospital, Poole, started nurses giving depot injections in the patients' homes in 1967.

We did not actually know that we were starting a community nursing service, the plan being for ward nurses to have 1 day off the ward a week to give injections to patients that they had nursed in hospital, in the hope that familiarity between nurse and patient would ensure compliance. It was only when an administrator noticed that two nurses had visited two patients in the same street on the same day that it was decreed that a full-time community nurse should be designated.

It might amuse our present-day nursing colleagues that the lady appointed had a case-load of 100 patients.

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