Risk Management in Mental Health Care - Term Paper Example

Running Head: Risk Management In Mental Health Care Risk Management: Mental Health Care By _______________________ There are twoways in which the mental health professionals can conduct risk assessment in a legal manner. Firstly, the psychiatrists and psychologist can be seeked help from by asking them to assess the risk for their clients. The actions should be imploed on those who are viewed as criminals or those who are the victims of any such act, perhaps experiencing child abuse. Secondly, the assessing professional should reveal what he/she knows about the user after the assessment as not disclosing information can further increase the risk of facing the danger and potential harm to the other people. "There are scientific, economic, and clinical reasons to treat mental illness separately from mental health. Biological etiology has been proven for some major psychoses, insurance coverage is more readily available, and treatment fits the "medical model". But the distinction is not clear-cut; much psychological suffering and disability is not due to major mental illness but to psychological or physical stress and trauma. Furthermore, health, not only disease, is the proper concern of physicians"(Lundberg 3: 1998). The changing behaviour of the society is imposing on professionals that their services are not up to the mark, further they might not have found the root causes of why a certain behaviour is proving to be dangerous for the public. The healthcare business itself is becoming more risky and the increasing competition among the professionals and the increasing population with change in attitude is also creating problems for the professionals to understand the root causes. The mental health users have been in danger from the early 1990s. As the policies of assessing mental risk have been changed and are considered more important since they have the direct concern with the life of other humans. Therefore the professionals are more precise about the mental heath risks. By discussing the risk to others' situation, we are referring to the behaviour of individuals who can affect the other people in the society perhaps by verbal abuse, physical assault, mental torture and even by the sexual assault on women. It becomes really hard for the professionals at times to identify what might have caused a person to take such actions, for instance a person is knowingly a dangerous one to others and have been into some serious fights with other people, but it might be as a result of some defending as he might have been attacked first by others. Other prevailing issues might be related to suicidal attempts as the person might have received some abuse in the childhood. The art of professional is to hide the details from the individual or service users about the fact that they are being treated as patients. However, it becomes so easy for the professionals to understand the situation and talk to the service users when they know the other person very well and know about the good and bad qualities of those individuals, close relationships can be very helpful in assisting the professionals. It is better not to let the individuals feel the fact that they are in a study about the risk to other people as the behaviour suddenly changes in that sense. While if we would let the users know about the situation then it can also create some trust between both the people and then it is a different situation, it is although hard to predict about what could make the user more familiar and honest while answering. As a legal regulation, it is the right of the service user to have accurate information about his/her behaviour. Risk should be identified accurately as its over-estimation can make the service user more threatening to other people while under estimation can show the professional's dishonesty. People function in an environment that is complex, uncertain, and hazardous. Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses determine the success of interactions with the surroundings. When faced with complexity and uncertainty, people use various methods to simplify judgments and decisions. They may use decision rules, construct mental models, or rely on outside sources of real or perceived expertise. In order to deal with either potential or realized unwanted outcomes, people make efforts to understand the personal significance of the situation, assess their capabilities for dealing with the consequences, regulate their emotional responses, and often try to alter the physical and emotional impacts. People use mental models to simplify their understanding of complex processes and relationships. Mental models can be elicited and evaluated. Researchers use open-ended interviews in which the respondents are encouraged to describe specific complex processes in as much detail as possible. Using this approach, researchers have examined the accuracy and completeness of understanding about such environmental threats as residential radon and global warming. Mental models of these processes typically have been found to be inaccurate and incomplete. The metal constructs people use to make sense of hazardous processes affect how the risk is perceived. In addition, the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral efforts people make to cope with threatening or harmful situations will be shaped by their mental models. The good part in the risk management from the service user viewpoint is that each and everyone of them is being offered with the regular appointments with psychiatrists and medication just to let the service users know that they are taken good care of. In order to manage the risk many of the service are available such as home treatments, assigning a nurse, psychotherapy, help in finding employment and leisure activities which could again bring the users under a caring shelter to encourage them living normally. Another issue while the user's stay at the medication place is that most of them feel hesitant to be there as they might feel unsafe from other patients and further they do not want to be treated as a child. The other issues while medication to the users are their past experiences in using medications as they might know about the side effects of the medicines. There are yet many things that we have to take care of while treating the users and to minimise the risks, those are managing the anger in the users, providing them with extra knowledge about the existing behaviour, making them participate in the group discussions about a particular issue, sharing their experiences with other would at least aware the others about the outcomes. However, this depends a lot on the professionals and their behaviour which could communicate every thing to the users. Risk assessment addresses the problem of predicting rare and unfamiliar outcomes. Environmental health risk assessment includes identification of hazards and effects, measurement and calculation of exposure levels, determination of who is likely to be exposed, derivation of the mathematical relationship between exposure level and unwanted outcome, and calculation of the probability of an unwanted outcome. These risk assessments are primarily quantitative. They rely on quantitative data analyses and on explicit assumptions about causal relationships, statistical relationships, extrapolation of results from experimental conditions to real-life conditions, and treatment of uncertainty. In scientific risk assessment, risk is defined as the probability of an unwanted outcome. Risk may be reported in various ways: as the annual fatality rate from a specific cause, as the lifetime probability of experiencing a particular illness, as the average number of years of life lost due to a certain cause, or as the expected frequency of a specified event. An estimate of environmental risk can be presented as the probable frequency of a certain magnitude event (e.g., a flood occurring, on average, once every 1,000 years). Both quantitative and qualitative properties are important in evaluating risk. For the nonspecialist, riskiness is characterized by both uncertainty and personal preferences and cannot be adequately captured by numerical probability alone. Risk management priorities based only on probability are often not accepted by the public, risk acceptability cannot be predicted completely by the probable outcome. That is, two alternatives posing risks with equal likelihood of an unwanted outcome may not be equally acceptable. Cultural perspectives and individual preferences are particularly important in the perception of risks related to pollution and technological accidents and have been found to influence strongly both the social significance of an incident and the lasting characterization (stigma) that is attached to affected individuals and communities. In conclusion to all the discussion, some aspects of our physical environment are more threatening than others and some interactions with our environment are more stressful than others. Many factors influence perceptions of environmental risk and choices of coping strategies. We make judgments and decisions within a framework that is described by cultural and personal values, historical and personal experience and knowledge, and institutional and personal capabilities. Over time, this framework changes. Some risks may increase while others decrease, new risks may appear as others disappear, and some risks may dominate while others become less important. As values, knowledge, and capabilities change, risk perceptions and coping options will change with them. Clinicians who evaluate and assist individuals experiencing distress from environmental interactions are confronted with the complicated, changeable, and yet, essential relationship between people and their world. The theories and findings of this relatively new field of scientific inquiry may be helpful to this process. References Lundberg A, "The Environment and Mental Health: A Guide for Clinicians" Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. Read More