Abstract

The lives of persons living with mental illness are affected by psychological, biological, social, economic, and environmental factors over the life course. It is therefore unlikely that simple preventive strategies, clinical treatments, therapeutic interventions, or policy options will succeed as singular solutions for the challenges of mental illness. Persons living with mental illness receive services and supports in multiple settings across the health care continuum that are often fragmented, uncoordinated, and inadequately responsive. Appropriate assessment is an important tool that health systems must deploy to respond to the strengths, preferences, and needs of persons with mental illness. However, standard approaches are often focused on measurement of psychiatric symptoms without taking a broader perspective to address issues like growth, development, and aging; physical health and disability; social relationships; economic resources; housing; substance use; involvement with criminal justice; stigma; and recovery. Using conglomerations of instruments to cover more domains is impractical, inconsistent, and incomplete while posing considerable assessment burden. interRAI mental health instruments were developed by a network of over 100 researchers, clinicians, and policy experts from over 35 nations. This includes assessment systems for adults in inpatient psychiatry, community mental health, emergency departments, mobile crisis teams, and long-term care settings, as well as a screening system for police officers. A similar set of instruments is available for child/youth mental health. The instruments form an integrated mental health information system because they share a common assessment language, conceptual basis, clinical emphasis, data collection approach, data elements, and care planning protocols. The key applications of these instruments include care planning, outcome measurement, quality improvement, and resource allocation. The composition of these instruments and psychometric properties are reviewed, and examples related to homeless are used to illustrate the various applications of these assessment systems.

Highlights

  • The lives of persons living with mental illness are affected by the interplay of a broad range intrinsic and extrinsic factors emerging over the life course

  • Biological, social, economic, and environmental causes, it is unlikely that preventive strategies, clinical treatments, therapeutic interventions, or policy options will succeed as singular solutions for the challenges of mental illness

  • This paper provides an overview of the interRAI suite of mental health instruments, which is designed to function as an integrated assessment and screening system to provide a holistic view of the person's strengths, preferences, and needs

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Summary

Introduction

The lives of persons living with mental illness are affected by the interplay of a broad range intrinsic and extrinsic factors emerging over the life course. InterRAI's multinational program of research aims to develop and implement comprehensive assessment and screening systems to support improved quality of care and quality of life among persons of all ages with complex needs across the continuum of health and social service settings.

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