I was wondering if anyone had had any experience in adapting Safewards for use in the community?
We have had discussions about this in Dunedin (NZ) and have been thinking about the initial arrival on to the ward and that this can 'set the scene' for the start of the admission. It would make sense to address this initial entry to reduce that initial conflict. I appreciate that this is quite a difficult time to intervene and that the 'crisis' may already be well under way by the time the community team is on board.
We have no intensive home-based treatment here in Dunedin, so it is either the CMHT or the Acute ward.
Kia Ora Steve, I worked for CMHT and the crisis team in the Waikato for 6 years until the start of this year and the admission process was often difficult. We're looking at introducing Safewards here in Newcastle, Australia, an so I'm getting my head around the resources. I'm not sure that the Safewards model and interventions as such would work from an admission CMHT perspective although much of the content on staff attitudes and modifiers for conflict would be applicable. I would imagine that if the ward introduced Safewards then the attitude of admitting staff (which was often the challenge for us) would be different. We started to look at the admission process prior to my leaving NZ and there are a number of factors that were open to change - allocation of admission nurse on shift, timely communication with single point of contact, mutually understood admission procedure etc. some of which were being put into place. Certainly by the time I left there was improvement. Chris Huxtable, CNS for the Waikato crisis home treatment team who also managed PICU for a period would be a good person to talk to, Cheers
