Sources used in this document:

Armitage, C. Fitzgerald, C. & Cheong, P. (March 12, 2003)

Prison in-reach mental health nursing. (psychiatry). Nursing Standard.: 40(3). 17-26 Health Reference Center Academic. Gale. Quincy College. 27 May 2008 http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=HRCA&docId=A100173734&source=gale&userGroupName=mlin_s_quincoll&version=1.0.

Armitage, Fitzgerald & Cheong have developed a comprehensive look at the manner in which the UK Health care system is responding to the increased awareness of under-recognized and under-treated occurrence of mental illness among incarcerated individuals. The emphasis of the article is to explain and detail a new service that was employed in the UK prison system in 2002. The system called in-reach which is a psychiatric nursing program that allows emploed psych nurses from NHS to enter into the prison system and provide services to previously underserved mental health patients, who have and have not been diagnosed with a mental illness. The program assists the prison staff and prisoners manage problem behavior and treat that which is associated with mental illness and that which is not but requires reasonable intervention from the staff. The work is foundational in that it describes a significant and universal problem, the lack of mental health treatment for prisoners incarcerated and details a very practical approach to the development and implementation of a plan to answer this needed lacking service. The key points of the article are collaboration between the nurses and staff and the open ended manner in which prisoners now feel more supported and better treated in prison because their needs are being met more effectively, even when they do not show the need of a mental health diagnosis. The case study in fact demonstrates an intervention for non-mental illness behavior intervention which was highly successful at treating self-harming behaviors in prison with one prisoner. The work is well written and well rounded and certainly relevant and topical to psych nursing as it shows an opportunity for continuity of care and diversity of autonomous care options and it shows that the system is responding to a well-known need for better mental health services in prisons. The article is introductory, to the problem of lack of mental health services in prison settings, descriptive of the intentions and structure of the in-touch program, and offers a minimal case study that could be expanded upon and added to too provide a better understanding of the outcomes of this new foundational service.