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Screening of the mental state of the over-75s in the community: what are GPs doing?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

D. M. Mackenzie*
Affiliation:
Royal Edinburgh Hospital, Morningside Terrace, Edinburgh EH10 5HF
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The new general practitioners' contract requires the primary health care team to perform a yearly assessment of their patients of 75 and over. This includes an assessment of the ‘mental condition’. In a list size of 2,000, typically 130 fall within this age group. Screening does not have to be carried out by the doctor and as 90% are already seen at least once a year, there is scope for opportunistic screening. Nonetheless, screening increases the general practitioner's workload and while it improves the morale of elderly people, it may have little impact on medical and functional problems.

Type
Original articles
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992

References

Further reading

Bond, J. (1987) Psychiatric illness in later life. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 2, 3957.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodkinson, H. M. (1972) Evaluation of a mental test score for assessment of mental impairment in the elderly. Age and Ageing, 1, 233238.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Iliffe, S., Haines, A., Gallivan, S. et al (1991) Assessment of elderly people in general practice. 1. Social circumstances and mental state. British Journal of General Practice, 41, 912.Google ScholarPubMed
McEwan, R. T., Davison, N., Forster, D. P. et al (1990). Screening elderly people in primary care: a randomised controlled trial. British Journal of General Practice, 40, 9497.Google Scholar
Wilson, L. A. & Brass, W. (1973) Brief assessment of the mental state in domicilliary practice. The usefulness of the Mental Status Questionnaire. Age and Ageing, 2, 92101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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