Specialised mental health service organisation—carer participation arrangements status (regular discussion groups)

Whether the service holds regular discussion groups to seek the views of carers about the service, to promote the participation of mental health carers in the planning, delivery and evaluation of the service.

A separately constituted specialised mental health service that is responsible for the clinical governance, administration and financial management of service units providing specialised mental health care.

Where the specialised mental health service organisation consists of multiple service units, those units can be considered to be components of the same organisation where they:

• operate under a common clinical governance arrangement;
• aim to work together as interlocking services that provide integrated, coordinated care to consumers across all mental health service settings; and
• share clinical records or, in the case where is more than one physical clinical record for each patient, staff may access (if required) the information contained in all of the physical records held by the organisation for that patient.

For most states and territories, the Specialised mental health service organisation object class is equivalent to the Area/District Mental Health Service. These are usually organised to provide the full range of admitted patient, residential and ambulatory services to a given catchment population. However, the object class may also be used to refer to health care organisations which provide only one type of mental health service (e.g. acute admitted patient care) or which serve a specialised or state-wide function.

Specialised mental health service organisation—carer participation arrangements status (regular discussion groups), code N Health, Standard 08/12/2004