Access Assessments for Admission to Adult Medium & Low Secure Services

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Access Assessments for Admission to Adult Medium & Low Secure Services

• IRAS ID

  315543

• Contact name

  Sarah Leonard

• Contact email

  sarah.leonard@manchester.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Manchester

• Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier

  N/A, N/A

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 0 months, 28 days

• Research summary

  Background:
  Secure services care for and treat people with severe mental health problems who are at serious risk to others. People can be referred to these services from prison, court, other inpatient services and the community. Before being accepted for these services, each patient undergoes an assessment to enable decisions to be made about if they need to be admitted and if so what care, treatment and level of security they need. This is known as an ‘access assessment’. At the moment we do not know how these assessments are experienced by patients, families and clinicians.

  Aim:
  The aim of the research is to better understand assessments of people who are referred to secure psychiatric services.

  Funder:
  The study is funded by the National Institute for Health Research

  Methods:
  We will conduct a series of interview with:
  1. Patients who have been referred to an access assessment service
  2. Family members of patients who have been referred to an access assessment service
  3. Clinicians who have made referrals to Access Assessment services, and
  4. Clinicians who have conducted the assessments to find out about their experiences.

  Patients will be recruited from inpatients services and the community. Family members will also be recruited from the community. Clinicians will be recruited from NHS secure services and ‘referrer’ services such as prison mental health teams, community mental health teams, and other inpatient services.

  Analysis:
  We will code the data and look for themes across the interviews which explain experiences of access assessments. We will use these themes to produce a report of the findings and to make suggestions about future access assessment procedures.

  Outcome:
  We hope that the findings from this research will help clinicians to make better decisions about people who are assessed for admission to secure services.
  

• REC name

  North West - Haydock Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  22/NW/0212

• Date of REC Opinion

  19 Jul 2022

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion