Intensive Rehabilitation Service (IRTS)
Intensive Rehabilitation & Treatment Service is a service that cares for people who have a long standing mental illness with complex social and family issues.
Each Key Worker has up to ten people on their individual caseloads and assistance is provided with all the activities that make up daily life.
All treatment is coordinated regarding mental illness and can include medication support, symptom managment and liason with the acute unit when inpatient care is required.
Staff work along side clients with family/whanau to help achieve the best possible life.
About IRTS
The Intensive Rehabilitation and Treatment Service (IRTS) systems and procedures have been founded on Assertive Outreach (a predominantly UK term)/Assertive Community Treatment (term used in USA) theories and practice. The main tenets of which are that:
- It is not a treatment but a way of organising and delivering care via a specialised team to provide intensive, highly co-ordinated and flexible support and treatment for clients with longer term needs living in the community
- Those referred to services that have adopted this approach are people with whom mainstream services have found it difficult to engage, and with histories including a severe and enduring mental illness, social chaos, high use of inpatient beds, and with multiple complex needs
- To be effective teams must deliver a mix of evidence based psychosocial intervention and intensive practical support from multi-skilled and multi-disciplinary practitioners
- The focus of the work must be on engagement and rapport, building up, often over the long term, strong relationships
- The teams work intensively, with an assertive approach to maintain regular contacts providing both treatment and rehabilitation
- There is a tension between this assertive approach and aspirations of a collaborative approach, recovery and self-determination. In other words taking responsibity, monitoring and maintaining “patients” versus nurturing, empowering, and fostering growth with “clients or “service users”. Managing this tension is an everyday occurence
- Team features include:
- Delivery by a discrete multi-disciplinary team able to provide a full range of interventions
- Most services are provided directly by team not brokered out
- Low staff to client ratios (1:10)
- Nearly all interventions are provided in community settings
- Emphasis on engagement and maintaining contact with clients
- Caseloads shared across clinicians, staff know and work with the entire caseload although a Key Worker is allocated and responsible
- Highly co-ordinated intensive service with brief daily handover meetings weekly clinical review meetings and mutliple impromptu discussions throughout each day
- Time unlimited service with continuity of care
To make a referral to IRTS the client should be matched against the following criteria.
Primary criteria:
- The person must be aged between 18 and 65
- They must be considered to have a chronic and enduring mental illness (Axis I, DSMIV)
- They must have had 4 or more inpatient admissions, and/or an aggregate of 6 months inpatient care over the last two years
Secondary criteria, the person must also meet at least 3 of the following:
- Failure to engage with traditional services
- At risk of persistent self harm or neglect
- Failure to respond to treatment
- Combined substance abuse and serious mental illness (dual diagnosis)
- Detention under the Mental Health Act on at least one occasion
- History of violence or persistent offending
For queries regarding making a referral and regarding the clients match with these criteria please do not hesitate to call IRTS on (06) 353 8990 and any staff member will be able to assist.
We have an 0800 number for clients and their whanau/families: 0800 LOVE IRTS (0800 568 347 87)
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Last Updated 22/11/2011