Community care in psychiatry

Abstract Diploma thesis deals with the issue of community care in psychiatry and its objective is to describe the importance of a nurse in providing this care. Community psychiatric care is a very wide area of an intermediary patient assistance designed to help the patients in any areas of their lives. Although in the Czech Republic community care has not achieved the appropriate development yet, its benefits for patients are important now and its importance has been growing. In the theoretical part, after a brief introduction to community care issues, history, principles, but also community care connection with nursing care, are mentioned. Subsequently, attention is paid to particular areas of community care that are important for the mentally ill and the role of a nurse in these areas is described. The approach to the mentally ill, the issue of stigmatization and psychiatric care organizations are mentioned. In the theoretical are part, psychiatric illnesses that may occur in community care are also analyzed and it is explained how community care may be beneficial for psychiatric patients. In the practical part, the objective was to find out the level of psychiatric nurses´ awareness of community care and to determine if they see the sense of community care in psychiatry. Making a survey of community care in which nurses can be involved was another objective of the work. The nurses´ responses to the stated hypotheses were statistically analyzed within quantitative research. The purpose of hypotheses stated was to determine whether nurses with the work experience longer than ten years are more likely to believe that psychiatric care is more beneficial for patients than hospitalization., And also, if nurses with an education higher than secondary have better awareness of community services provision. Other hypotheses were focused on finding out whether nurses consider the most common community care services issue in the Czech Republic to be housing promotion and if nurses aged over thirty years are more aware of the nurses´ role importance in community care. None of those hypotheses were confirmed. The hypothesis assuming that nurses obtain more information on community care from the Internet and literature than at workshops was confirmed. Psychiatric nurses working in mental homes in the South Moravian region and the Vysočina region took part in this research. A component of the practical part is also an analysis of community services in these regions. In both the regions 13 civic associations and community centers were mapped