Psychiatric intensive-care unit

Psychiatric Intensive Care Units or PICUs are specialist twenty-four hour inpatient wards that provide intensive assessment and comprehensive treatment to individuals during the most acute phase of a serious mental illness. Psychiatric intensive care is for patients who are in an acutely disturbed phase of a serious mental disorder. There is an associated loss of capacity for self-control with a corresponding increase in risk which does not allow their safe, therapeutic management and treatment in a less acute or a less secure mental health ward. Care and treatment must be patient-centred, multidisciplinary, intensive and have an immediacy of response to critical clinical and risk situations. Patients should be detained compulsorily under the appropriate mental health legislative framework, and the clinical and risk profile of the patient usually requires an associated level of security. Psychiatric intensive care is delivered by qualified and suitably trained multidisciplinary clinicians according to an agreed philosophy of unit operational policy underpinned by the principles of therapeutic intervention and dynamic clinically focused risk management Most individuals only stay on PICU wards for a very short time and are moved as soon as the crisis is over or the risky behaviours are under control. 2014 guidance says that the maximum length of stay should be 8 weeks. Normally,

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