Role of Nurses in Community Mental Health Centers: Example of England

The goal of the community mental health centers, which constitute the core of community based mental health service model, is to register the patients who live in a certain geographical region and have serious mental disorder in the center, to observe them regularly and to bring them back to community by providing their rehabilitation and treatment. The practice of community based mental health, which English health service carries out in one hand for the psychiatry patients’ treatment and care, has many benefits, such as minimizing the sequence of going to hospital. The community mental health nurse, who works as an incidence manager, takes on the responsibility of treatment and care of the patient in the place where he/she lives, and the directly protective effect of this responsibility is an unquestionable fact. With this practice, the process of taking cure in hospital and the cost of treatment and care decrease. In our country, this sub-field of psychiatry is still in its incipient stage. Being familiar with the successful model practices in different countries may constitute a good model for the community mental health nursing practices which are on the first level in our country. For this purpose, the role of the nurses who work for the community mental health service in England is presented in this study.