Mental Health Act Assessments
AMHPs are responsible for organising, co-ordinating and contributing to Mental Health Act assessments. It is the AMHP's duty, when two medical recommendations have been made, to decide whether or not to make an application to a named hospital for the detention of the person who has been assessed. To be detained under the Mental Health Act individuals need to be suffering from a mental disorder, the nature or degree of which warrants detention in hospital on the grounds of their health and/or the risk they present to themselves and/or the risk they present to others. The AMHP's role includes arranging for the assessment of the person concerned by two medical practitioners who must be independent of each other and at least one of whom should be a specialist in mental health. Preferably one of the medical assessors should have previous acquaintance with the person being assessed. Efforts should be made to seek less restrictive alternatives to detention if it is safe and appropriate to do so, such as using an individuals's own support networks, in line with the principle of care in the least restrictive environment. AMHP's are expected to take account of factors such as gender, culture, ethnicity, age, sexuality and disability in their assessments. Efforts should be also made to overcome any communication barriers, such as deafness or the assessors and the assessed not sharing a language, and an interpreter may be required. It is not good practice for one of the assessors to act as interpreter.
Read more about this topic: Approved Mental Health Professional
Famous quotes containing the words mental, health and/or act:
“Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has a good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will pa tronize in vain,—which taste cannot tolerate,—which ridicule will seize.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“As they move into sharing parenting, men often are apprentices to women because they are not yet as skilled in child care. Mothers have to be willing to teach fathers—both by stepping in and showing and by stepping back and letting them learn.”
—Nancy Press Hawley. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)
“quaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.”
—Alec Derwent Hope (b. 1907)