Clear guidance on good PICU design unveiled

News that DIMHN and NAPICU were working together to produce a substantive and detailed guide to the effective design and construction of psychiatric intensive care units was first announced a year earlier at the 2016 DIMH conference, held at the same venue, the National Motorcycle Museum, in May last year. Speaking at that event, DIMHN chair, Jenny Gill, and Dr Faisil Sethi, who is vice-chair of NAPICU, and, in his professional role, is a consultant psychiatrist and PICU lead consultant at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, explained why the two organisations had decided to come together to co-produce the new guidance. While publications such as the 2016 NAPICU Guidelines for NHS Clinical Commissioners, and the ‘more detailed’ 2014 National Standards for Psychiatric Intensive Care in General Adult Services touched on the topics, there was, Dr Sethi explained, no existing guidance material that would provide service providers with a firm concept on how to ‘spec’ or build PICUs. Additionally, while HBN 03-01, Adult acute mental health units, the Department of Health’s Environmental Design Guide to adult medium secure services, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Standards for Low Secure Services, plus ‘a raft of other guidelines’, were ‘instructive to a degree’, none provided the detail that DIMHN and NAPICU felt was necessary to provide really instructive help to those seeking to design, build, and equip PICUs.

Against this backdrop, it was agreed that the two organisations’ different strengths – NAPICU has extensive clinical expertise, patient and carer experience, and involvement in, and good knowledge of, clinically derived standards, while DIMHN has expertise in design, healthcare planning, building, and construction, engineering, furniture, fixtures and fittings, and product design and standard setting – would complement each other, thus contributing to a successful outcome. Between them, Dr Sethi explained, the DIMHN Board and the NAPICU Executive also possessed ‘a wealth of expertise and experience’.

A year on from the official announcement of the joint work, the speakers from DIMHN and NAPICU at DIMH 2017 described the past year’s successful collaboration to create the new guidance document, Design Guidance for Psychiatric Intensive Care Units 2017, and outlined some of the key content. The first of three speakers was Caroline Parker, a consultant pharmacist in Mental Health at the Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust, and NAPICU’s director of Operations, who began by talking a little about NAPICU. She described the Association as ‘a multidisciplinary organisation with members from throughout the UK and abroad, comprising a mixture of professionals from all backgrounds, including nurses, pharmacists, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, patients, and carers’. The speaker said: “Our commitment is to improve and promote the care of patients at the difficult time when they are in a PICU environment.” Caroline Parker explained that NAPICU had already published two guidance documents on national standards of clinical care for patients in such settings, and also worked on an ongoing basis with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which runs a number of accreditation schemes for psychiatric services and inpatient units.