One of the things we usually ignored or taken for granted is the state of our mental health. We go on our day to day lives without a thought of assessing ourselves. We often forget to listen to how are we feeling or thinking about and continue with actions that slowly deteriorates our mental health and lead not to only worse mental health problems but also affect our physical state.
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Research has stated that too much stress and anxiety can actually impact our physical state and lead to health problems. Some people even experienced hyperventilation, while the others, after experiencing chronic stress, start to experience stiffness on their necks which surges up to the head – as if your head was struck in half by a lightning bolt.
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This is only the few negative impacts of an unhealthy mental state which is why we must try our best to be responsible and take care of our mental health. Our healthcare professionals are also trying their best to make up solutions in the psychological realm in order to help those people who could not heal themselves alone especially with our very own mind be sometimes hard to control. Some of our healthcare professionals would sythesize drugs in order to balance out the body’s chemical factors which causes the imbalances of the hormones that lead to stress. There are anti-depressants and other drugs that help with maintenance as well as minimizing the excess hormones that causes stress. While there are some healthcare professionals who can treat their patients via consultations or what we normally call it, therapy. Patients would go to psychologists or therapists to consult them about their mental health and in return, these healthcare professionals help with decoding the patient’s problems thus helping the paient what they are going through.
Collaborative Care
A patient can just resort to one healthcare professional regarding their mental health problems since some of them might have self-diagnosed and are aware of their habits. They could either buy medications to improve their mental health, or they could go consult a therapist. It can be subjective on how a patient wants to handle their state but it is still recommended to go both ways. But how can two different healthcare professionals be able to work together and provide the best healthcare services to their patients?
This is when the term, collaborative care comes in. Collaborative care is defined to be a concept of two or more professionals establishing a close professional relationship with each other in order to give their patient the best quality of service to patients in terms of physical and mental health. The purpose of collaborative care is to have more than a single healthcare professional work and communicate well with other treating teams to come up with the best treatment that will guarantee the patient to heal.
Besides the concept of collaborative care as having a team of different healthcare professionals teaming up and giving suggestions, collaborative care also involves the components like managing the case of a patient, having great coordination, being educated about the patient, constant research and educating oneself about the case, constant follow-ups about the patient, systemic operations in treating the patient, following guidelines, involving psychological concepts about health, and decision-making regarding the patient without any bias.
Collaborative Care in Mental Health
Having a team of a combination of mental and physical healthcare professionals can be beneficial for the reasons that these professional who collaboratively work together can solve a puzzle of how the mental health can be correlated with the patient’s physical state. These professionals can interconnect how the physiological aspects can affect the function of the brain. Their constant research can help narrow down their diagnoses and help the treatment of a patient once and for all.
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What are the Benefits of Collaborative Care in Mental Health?
Collaborative care between mental and physical health doctors can easily diagnose the patient’s condition. Research has stated that collaborative care is more effective than conventional care when it comes to treating a patient with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorders, and schzophrenia. Moreover, the collective ideas and knowledge exchange between the collaboration of mental and physical healthcare professionals can also treat physical comorbidities in patients. This model is basically hitting two birds with one stone. With the birds are the physical and mental illnesses, and the stone as the team of healthcare professionals.
What are Some Facts Regarding Collaborative Care in Mental Health?
According to some resources, it was stated that people who suffered from depression has responded better and faster when treated by a team of healthcare professionals who practice collaborative practices with other healthcare professionals with different disciplines. Another fact about collaborative care, is that it is cost-effective unlike other treatment models in all of the categories to be considered such as the cost of medications, inpatient, outpatient, as well as mental health care. This model is also cost-effective for the management of patients who not only suffers from severe mental health problems but the physical comorbidities it gained from it. Lastly, patients who hav tried the collaborative care model have given a high satisfactory rate when it comes to the management of depressing moods often times. In order to improve this model and establish its permanent ground as one of the models that can effectively heal patients, is to include more evidence-based modalities that will ensure high possibilities of treating a patient.
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What is the Takeaway?
It can be noted that in he medical aspect, providing of healthcare services to patients have improved so much by then and it will continue to do so. There are still yet to discover with the functionalities of the human body and the mind but it is no doubt that it will be discovered and be upgraded again with the constant researching of professionals. Another takeaway is that medical treatment is not only strictly narrowed to one aspect especially since we have finally come to an understanding that psychology can be interconnected with physiology and how they harmoniously work together to maintain a homeostasis. One imbalance in one of these aspects can actually cause several changes and disrupt balance that keeps us alive and well.
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Sources:
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-020-05691-8
https://aims.uw.edu/collaborative-care
https://ijmhs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13033-020-00410-6#:~:text=Collaborative%20care%20is%20a%20complex,mental%20and%20physical%20health%20outcomes.
