Person Centered Care

In Ireland, following on from the Mental Health Commission, it can be seen that there is a move towards family centered care (Murphy et al (2015). Quality is fast becoming a central part of the mental health service and was a guiding aspect of the strategy “shaping a healthcare future: a strategy for effective health care in the 1990’s” (MHC, 2007). The main principles include person centeredness, quality, equity and accountability. The main objective is to ensure that quality and safety of care is sustained and regularly evaluated.

A Vision for Change (2006), mental health policy was the first document published since the 1994 document, Planning for the Future. The emphasis of this quality framework is of a recovery orientated philosophy and

It recommends a person centred treatment approach where service users are treated as individuals with respect to their rights (McCormack, 2010). Person centered care highlights that the mental health service puts the service user at the centre of care, and involves equality, access and protection of rights (HIQA, 2012). Person centered approach places an emphasis on the involvement of the service user and their families. Interventions should be aimed at maximising recovery from mental illness, and building on the resources within service users and within their immediate social networks to allow them to achieve meaningful integration and participation in community life. In this quality framework, it is recommended that well trained community based multidisciplinary mental health teams be put in place, offering home based and outreach services to individuals with a mental illness. Community mental health teams have the responsibility for self governance and to be accountable to service users and their families. This governance should adapt to accept diversity and change. (Sugarman, 2008), suggests that any governance system will be innovative to achieve this, and in doing this may discover an aspect of creativity in governance with wider

It has been highlighted that the development of community services has been poor. There still remains to be a shortage of fully staffed multidisciplinary teams. This in turn, has made it difficult for vulnerable people such as elderly and children to access the appropriate services. Other services such as rehabilitation and forensic services have seen little progress since A Vision for Change was introduced. The ongoing cutbacks to the public health service, lack of specialist services and the slow progress of filling vacant positions of occupational therapists, psychology and social work in order to provide a more holistic approach has been hampering the progress of the frameworks implementation. However there has also seen some positive results since the framework was developed. There is new and innovative youth friendly service and other mental health service s being developed through partnership between statutory and voluntary sectors. There has also seen the opportunity to appoint a director of mental health services which would encourage the creation of a directorate as was hoped in the development of A Vision for