The email advised GPs of developments within the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (BHSCT) Psychiatry of Old Age Service – a community-based service that provides assessment and review of older adults following referral from GPs, which ordinarily operate with a target waiting time of nine weeks.<\/p>\n
It said due to the ongoing staffing pressures it “had to temporarily stand down new and review appointments within the Psychiatry of Old Age Service”.<\/p>\n
It also said it was not in an position to offer the hospital liaison service for older adults.<\/p>\n
It advised GPs to continue to submit referrals as usual and said the service would continue to triage all referrals, with the remaining workforce focusing on “prioritising urgent or high-risk referrals for assessment and intervention”.<\/p>\n
“While routine appointments cannot currently proceed, the team remains committed to ensuring that individuals presenting with urgent or escalating concerns are identified promptly and offered an appropriate response,” it said.<\/p>\n
The email added that the Community Mental Health Team for Older People was “actively providing support, advice, and follow up to individuals whose appointments have been cancelled”.<\/p>\n
It said it recognised “that these temporary measures will present challenges for patients, families” and said the trust was “working diligently to stabilise staffing levels, restore capacity, and safeguard patients during this period of disruption”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The email advised GPs of developments within the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (BHSCT) Psychiatry of Old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":["post-534415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534415\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}