NHS and Community Care Act 1990 and Discharge of Psychogeriatric Inpatients

✍ Scribed by AJIT SHAH; TAMAL DE

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 52 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6230
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1166(199705)12:5<587::aid-gps609>3.0.co;2-a

✦ Synopsis

The absence of any eect of the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 on discharge of psychogeriatric inpatients is very interesting . Our recent study has reported similar ®ndings . All discharges from an inner London psychogeriatric unit for a year before (1 April 1992±31 March 1993; N 186) and a year after (1 April 1993±31 March 1994; N 180) the introduction of this Act were examined retrospectively. There were no dierences between the two groups for the length of hospital admissions and proportion of patients discharged to nursing and residential homes. Also, there was no evidence of a surge of discharges to nursing and residential homes in the months leading up to the introduction of this Act. These ®ndings have also been observed among geriatric inpatients . However, this absence of eect needs to be interpreted cautiously.

It may be that the broad principles of community care were already being practised in all three health and social services above; thus, the introduction of the Act may not have in¯uenced discharge planning. However, a more likely explanation is that the local social services may have been poorly resourced both before and after the introduction of the Act and thus the Act may not have in¯uenced service delivery . Moreover, 6±12 months after the introduction of