The theme for World Mental Health Day 2020 is “Mental Health for All: Greater Investment – Greater Access.” The goal of October 10, 2020, is to highlight the importance of health policies and actions aimed at promoting better mental health globally.
However, if we focus on data related to hospital admissions, it becomes evident that the psychiatric field has the highest percentage of repeated admissions: according to the Annual Report on Hospitalization Activities from the Ministry of Health, analyzing discharge records, about one in three patients (32.5%) is hospitalized more than once in a year. This trend, which remains stable over time according to recent years’ discharge records, highlights the need to revise the approach of psychiatric services (both inpatient and outpatient) concerning patient care and hospitalization.
The area that most significantly impacts the quality of patient hospitalization (and probably also the effectiveness of therapeutic treatment in acute phases) is certainly one that involves a different approach. This approach should help healthcare staff more effectively maintain constant control over patients without it being perceived as invasive by the patients, even in the case of particularly severe and emerging illnesses such as Alzheimer’s.
It is essential to foster a relationship between the patient and healthcare staff that is as serene as possible, where the staff are not perceived as overseers by those experiencing psychiatric conditions, whether temporary or permanent. The healthcare professional should be seen by the patient as a sort of “Guardian Angel” who assists in potentially critical situations and, where possible, empathetically explains the reasons for their presence at that particular moment.
But how can we intervene only when it is truly necessary to prevent potentially dangerous situations? The answer lies in a different approach to the issue of psychiatric patient control that TapmyLife has extensively studied and tested: control mediated by technology with tools that ensure absolute safety and minimal invasiveness in the challenging care or assistance pathway.
Active patient safety services based on artificial intelligence and image recognition systems provide widespread and active monitoring of patients with simple cameras installed in the rooms of “at-risk” patients. These cameras allow monitoring directly from the Nurses’ Station or from a smartphone, ensuring that if there are abnormal movements (e.g., getting out of bed without assistance, falling, leaving the room), the healthcare worker is immediately alerted. The worker can then visually verify the situation from the nurses’ station console or, if mobile, from their smartphone, and assist the patient in real-time to prevent the risky situation.
We believe that World Mental Health Day should also be an opportunity to discuss these issues. Despite the commendable work of the World Health Organization in preventing mental distress from evolving into full-fledged pathology requiring institutional care, we must confront some impressive numbers: nearly one billion people live with a mental disorder.
For those facing hospitalization, the quality of their stay is an essential element in building, where possible, a shared recovery path that takes advantage of the most advanced technology available. The protection of the patient, their safety, and the peace of mind of the staff in these delicate wards cannot be separated from the implementation of systems that ensure smarter and more effective monitoring of vulnerable patients.
