Psychological services within the Acute Adult Mental Health Care Pathway
Guidelines for service providers, policy makers and decision makers.
29 August 2023
Psychological services within the Acute Adult Mental Health Care Pathway - Full Briefing Paper
Improved access to psychological assessment, formulation and a range of brief evidence based psychological interventions (individual, family and group) is required in the acute adult mental health pathway to increase treatment choice, effectiveness and collaborative care.
Psychologists should be an integral part of acute adult mental health teams to promote reflective, compassionate, trauma informed care for service user's and carers, and to influence the multidisciplinary team culture.
Reflective, psychologically led team supervision and post-incident support are required to promote the psychological wellbeing, resilience and retention of staff; ameliorating the emotional impact of working in challenging environments.
Psychologists should have capacity to provide training to increase psychological skills in the workforce, enhancing psychologically informed care provision, and to provide supervision of psychologically informed interventions.
For a comprehensive, effective, acute mental health service to be delivered psychological staffing provision needs to be reviewed and increased across the pathway. Recommendations for staffing and skill mix are provided.
Advice for service users, carers, and families
This leaflet is for service users, carers, families and those with an interest in services for people experiencing acute mental health issues.
It is a shortened version of the Full Briefing Paper on Psychological Services within the Acute Adult Mental Health Care Pathway.
Download the advice leaflet for service users, carers, and families