ABSTRACT
The project described was designed to establish rates of severe mental illness (SMI) in both health and social services, and explore the extent to which both served similar or different populations. This chapter is concerned with two aspects of the consequences of the policy. The first is the absence of a meaningful operational definition of SMI, and the second is the extent to which the two major staff groups providing community care to people with SMI were, in the late 1990's, already targeting their services on people with SMI. Community psychiatric nurses and community based social workers are the major staff resource in statutory services for the provision of community care. A cross sectional design was used to study the characteristics of clients in contact with community mental health workers in 8 locations in Britain. The study revealed a difference in the proportion of cases having the characteristics associated with SMI, in health and social services.
