WHO publishes practical guide to moving psychiatric care from long-stay hospitals to the community
The World Health Organization has published Supporting the transition to community-based mental health and social care: practical guide to the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals. It is aimed at psychiatric hospital leaders and decision-makers supporting adults who have experienced long stays in psychiatric hospitals.
What happened
WHO says institutional care continues to dominate in many places and can absorb substantial mental health resources while separating people from their communities, limiting their autonomy and exposing them to risks of human rights violations.
The guide treats deinstitutionalization as system-wide reform: aligning policies, laws and funding; developing community-based mental health services and housing supports; and changing care practices and cultures. It builds on WHO’s existing policy guidance.
Actions are organised across three phases, plan, prepare and provide, and three areas hospitals can influence: reducing admissions and lengths of stay, transforming care within hospitals, and increasing supported discharge, continuity of care and community participation. They are grouped by leadership, partnership and mandate responsibilities, involving hospitals, authorities, people with lived experience, families, workers and community services.
Why it matters
Moving care into the community depends on services being there after discharge: housing, continuing treatment and coordination between providers. For counsellors and psychologists, that puts weight on referral pathways and on working across settings within their own competence.
The guide is practical guidance, not binding international law, and it does not call for hospitals to close immediately. It is written to be adapted by countries at different stages of reform.
Source
- World Health OrganizationSupporting the transition to community-based mental health and social care (ISBN 978-92-4-012413-4)