Psychiatric patients are at high risk of developing physical health complications. This is due to various factors including medications prescribed, life style choices and diagnostic overshadowing. Admission to a psychiatric unit provides a prime opportunity to review a patient's physical healthcare. We noticed prior to the commencement of this project that this opportunity was not always being used in the inpatient unit, with one in four patients at baseline data collection having no physical health checks. This is despite clear guidance laid out in the trust policy 'Physical Examination of Service Users during Admission to Hospital'. We aimed to improve compliance with these checks to 100%. A number of prior audits in this area had failed to sustain improvement. Therefore, we proposed a quality improvement approach involving a series of plan do study act cycles, in order to test and review processes prior to implementation. The first cycle involved simplification of the paper-based documentation used for physical health checks, which resulted in minimal improvement by 5%. The second cycle involved combining this documentation with the history taking proforma resulting in an overall improvement in compliance to 90%. We learnt that a move away from the more widely used audit towards a more holistic approach of quality improvement allowed an informed continuum of change to take place which likely led to sustained improvement. Post implementation data collected at 1 month revealed compliance remained at 90%. Our initial 100% target was perhaps unrealistic, as there are also longstanding underlying cultural issues around physical healthcare in psychiatric patients that are complex to address and beyond the scope of this project.
Keywords: inpatients; mental disorders; physical health; psychiatry; quality improvement project.