Maurício Lucchesi

Although having appeared more than a century ago in Europe, the increase in the number of mental health units in general hospitals in Brazil met the guidelines of the public health and psychiatric reforms propagated since the early seventies. Since then, these units haven t been submitted to a systematic assessment. The objective of present work was to be acquainted with the functioning modes of some of these units in São Paulo metropolitan area, their insertion in the mental health assistance system and their commitment to the population. In order to do so, there was an attempt to obtain, according to an assessment logic, the premisses guiding the use of information by the managers situated in different levels in relation to the studied units. The findings showed little clarity concerning the uses of such instruments inside the assistance system, which seems to be connected to the lack of a mental health policy for the studied region. The most frequently mentioned difficulties, like the impossibility to guarantee the patient the continuity of the treatment in the extra hospital services, after he has left the hospital, and the great proportion of patients that arrive at urgency services without having the need to receive urgent care, were not seen as something that general hospitals themselves could contribute to. The units, where the information about the services production were privileged to the prejudice of the assesment of the services access and the impact of the unit on the healthconditions of the population living under its referal areas, function independently of the rest of the mental health services, which contributes to the mental health care fragmentation and iniquity. One of the principal examples is the exclusion of patients from the the general hospitals psychiatric inpatient services, especially the chronically mentally ill, whose pathologies make an effective treatment impossible, considering the period of time set for hospitalization. On the other hand, there has been identified initiatives that wish to redeem the integrate care, especially for the patients that require a more complex and long run treatment. An alternative for the care of the patients that have the most prevalent disabilities would be the use of pressure mechanisms like information concerning the uses of psychiatric urgency services to estimulate local managers investments.

"A gestão de unidades de saúde mental em hospitais gerais na grande São Paulo". / General hospital psychiatric units management in São Paulo metropolitan area

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