S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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communities. Remote nurses rely on the nursing note entries made by the MHN teams for information concerning mental health issues and patients: There isn’t a lot of handover or hand back to the residential workforce about what is the plan of action for this individual … I think that’s one of … the disadvantages of the specialisation and the fly-in/fly-out … you don’t have … people in community imparting knowledge daily and building capacity within the workforce. [T10, p. 13–14] We don’t sit in and we don’t interact during the sessions … I tend to read the mental health nurse’s notes once they’ve left, just out of curiosity. [T4, p. 12] No. It’s the mental health nurse and the psychiatrist. But he [the psychiatrist] always leaves notes. Notes are available. [T5, p. 17] 7.2.5 General (medical) practitioners (GPs) GPs are rarely permanent in remote locations (see Chapter 1). If a GP does reside or is sessionally present in a community, they are a valuable asset for nurses. GPs are contacted to manage mental health patients either for mental health advice/medication or for referrals. One remote nurse participant stated in relation to the significance of a resident GP: Hell, yeah. Yes, yes. Yes, because you can get medication orders … get them [GPs] in to check the patient over, because you always worry that you might miss something because you’re not trained that way. [T7, p. 11–12] Referrals to GPs reduce the nurses’ mental health workload, and their mental health advice makes delivering mental healthcare less stressful and burdensome.

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