Peer Response Capstone


 

Michael R.

The increasing awareness of adult mental health problems in recent years has led to a reassessment of crisis response techniques. For those experiencing mental health crises, urgent community intervention is becoming a more and more common strategy in West Kendall, Miami, as an alternative to typical emergency department care. How these two strategies impact patients, specifically, quality of life, readmission rates, and total healthcare expenses over a six-month period—is the main emphasis of the PICOT inquiry.

The goal of immediate community intervention is to help people in distress in a timely, proactive, and accessible manner. This paradigm frequently includes community resources such as peer support, crisis counseling, and links to further treatment. Community intervention can boost people’s sense of agency and connection to resources by creating a trusting and engaging atmosphere, both of which greatly improve quality of life. Nursing leaders actively promote evidence-based practice implementation, work to influence evidence-based practice implementation processes and integrate evidence-based practice implementation into everyday policy and practices (Kitson et al., 2021). On the other hand, although it is necessary for immediate safety and stability, standard emergency room care frequently ignores the underlying problems that are causing the crisis. Patients often describe the experience as confusing and stigmatizing, potentially deterring them from seeking additional treatment.

Individuals who get community-based interventions may have reduced readmission rates, according to research. In community settings, the focus on holistic treatment frequently involves follow-up support, which is essential for averting crisis recurrence. Evidence-based practice has been considered as a key for healthcare quality measure (Alqahtani et al., 2019). Additionally, community interventions typically prioritize continuity of care, ensuring individuals connect to ongoing support networks. Traditional ED visits, when the primary goal is to relieve symptoms right away without much long-term planning, stand in stark contrast to this continuity.

When comparing these two therapeutic options, healthcare expenses are an important factor. Even though they necessitate an initial training and resource investment, immediate community intervention programs can result in significant long-term cost reductions. These initiatives can lower the high expenses of ER visits, hospital stays, and repeated readmissions by efficiently handling community crises and decreasing dependency on emergency services.

Awareness of the relative efficacy of community vs. traditional care models requires knowledge of evidence-based practice, or EBP. EBP guides healthcare decision-making by combining patient values, clinical experience, and the best available research data. By using EBP principles, practitioners can evaluate existing literature and figure out which of two intervention techniques works best, which can lead to better practices. Evidence-based practice (EBP) ensures that health care employs optimal evidence from quality studies and integrates it with patient needs, values and clinician expertise (Skela-Savič et al., 2020).

The literature evaluation on the PICOT question reveals promising trends supporting prompt community intervention. Research indicates that for people going through mental health crises, community interventions greatly improve quality of life indicators, reduce readmission rates, and save total healthcare costs. Utilizing an integrative approach that gives community resources priority is becoming increasingly crucial as research continues to advance. By adopting this, the mental health care system can lessen the overall load on emergency services, improve patient outcomes, and increase accessibility to care.