Proposed Topic (Most preferred): :
HA Young Investigators Session (Projects to be presented by HA staff who had joined HA for 10 years or less)
Proposed Topic (Second preferred): :
Clinical Safety and Quality Service III (Projects aiming at quality service to patients and their carers)
Authors (including presenting author) :
LAU CS(1), Christensen M(2)
Affiliation :
(1)Psychiatric Inpatient Service, Kwai Chung Hospital, (2)School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Introduction :
Involuntary psychiatric admission in hospital settings is inevitable all over the world to safeguard mentally ill individuals and communities. Nevertheless, it has been considered a violation of human rights and commonly accompanies limited patients’ therapeutic outcomes. To improve the quality of mental health services, understanding the service users’ experiences plays the key role. Existing studies exploring patients’ experiences of involuntary psychiatric admission are facing a limitation of strong sampling bias. Through studying perspectives of service providers, those missed data on this topic could be found. However, there is very little research to explore psychiatric nurses’ perspectives on this topic across different cultures and legislative systems.
Objectives :
To better understand the psychiatric nurses’ perspectives on service users’ experiences of involuntary admission in the psychiatric hospital setting of Hong Kong.
Methodology :
Inductive thematic analysis as described by Braun & Clarke was used to identify themes generated from the data collected by seven semi-structured individual face-to-face interviews.
Result & Outcome :
Four central themes were identified: i) there is no way out except involuntary admission; ii) coercive but therapeutic hospital life; iii) different patients react differently; and iv) the pathway of recovery is full of challenges. This study highlights that nurses deem the experience could traumatize patients, making them disengage from mental health services after discharge. However, most of the participants pointed out that involuntary psychiatric admission was necessary as a final attempt to protect the community and help these patients with treatments efficiently. To better engage these patients in mental health services, nurses valued the following patients’ experiences: i)the facilitation of judge-patient interactions, ii)timely and continuous psychoeducation, iii) peer support. Sometimes we need to step back to review the bigger picture and find what we missed and/or are valuable for further investigation of a topic. The findings of this study emphasized the need to figure out how to reduce the traumas and better engage these involuntarily admitted patients in treatment. Future studies should investigate how to promote more judge-patient interactions, provide psychoeducation, utilise peer support with the best feasibility and effectiveness. Research comparing nurses’ perspectives and patients’ experiences is also suggested to complete the picture of involuntary admission.
