Shared Reflection to Maximize Resources and Minimize Costs: The Reflecting Team Applied to a Hospital Environment

Severe mental illness entails multiple hospital admissions and a large use of public resources. The Reflecting Team (RT), together with other dialogue strategies, place in a single therapeutic space, the patient, his family and a team of professionals to find together a solution to a situation of st...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Community mental health journal 2021-05, Vol.57 (4), p.746-752
Main Authors: Balcells-Oliveró, M. M., Nuño, L., Freixa, N., Domínguez, I., Pons, I., Alcover, E., Gual, T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Clinical decision making
Clinical variables
Community and Environmental Psychology
Continuity of care
Cost analysis
Costs
Decision making
Families & family life
Feasibility
Hospitalization
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Mental disorders
Mental health
Original Paper
Patient admissions
Patient care planning
Patients
Psychiatric hospitals
Psychiatry
Teams
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Summary:Severe mental illness entails multiple hospital admissions and a large use of public resources. The Reflecting Team (RT), together with other dialogue strategies, place in a single therapeutic space, the patient, his family and a team of professionals to find together a solution to a situation of stagnation. The aim of this study was to evaluate feasibility and cost-effectiveness of a RT intervention in psychiatric inpatients in a public hospital. Six RT were performed, and clinical variables were collected retrospectively for six months pre-RT and post-RT. Both number of hospital admissions and total time spent in the psychiatric acute unit show a significant decrease. All computed cost showed statistically significant reduction. The results suggest RT might be a good strategy to introduce a positive change in the treatment of those psychiatric cases in which the patient and family find themselves caught in a system that seems to offer stale and ineffective help to problems that have become chronic.
ISSN:0010-3853
1573-2789
DOI:10.1007/s10597-020-00716-2