Use of a capacity audit tool in a mental health setting.

Conclusion The CAT was successfully applied to the mental health setting and identified a set of opportunities to improve processes and practices to reduce the identified delays or barriers in order to improve patient flow.What is known about the topic? Capacity management and, in particular, timely discharge are key components to optimise patient flow and improve access block for emergency departments. The CAT has been successfully applied in general health settings to identify key delays and barriers to discharge.What does this paper add? This article reports on the applicability of the CAT in a mental health setting and the ability of the tool to improve our understanding of bed capacity by identifying key reasons for the use of mental health in-patient beds across a stepped model of care and quantifying the most frequent causes of discharge delay.What are the implications for practitioners? This paper describes the modifications of the CAT to make it applicable to the mental health setting and the associated results obtained using the CAT in a mental health setting. The project demonstrated applicability of the tool to the mental health setting. It can be used in other jurisdictions to identify key discharge delays to underpin targeted improvement work within local mental health environments. PMID: 26210136 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research