Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau (KWNC) organized theme talk at the Auditorium of Kiang Wu Hospital on 3 December, 2016, where the Director of the Psychiatry Department of Conde de São Januário Hospital Dr. Ho Chi Wing was invited to share his working experiences and the community psychiatric services of Macao in recent years. It is hoped that through this theme talk, further development of community psychiatric services in Macao can be facilitated.
The theme talk was hosted by KWNC Assistant Professor Chuang Yao Chen and Lecturer Chen Sijuan. During the talk, Dr. Ho Chi Wing first introduced the concept that "absence of mental healthiness means no health" and emphasized that it is of extreme importance for the public to ensure their mental health. He explained that there are different cultural characteristics across the regions and the governmental policies and services must be designed according to local needs. He then illustrated different services that are constructed with a combination of modern mental health care theories and localized situations of Macao for example the quaternary prevention mechanism in Macao. Such mechanism is composed of an interprofessional team including psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse, general nurse, medical social worker, occupational therapist and psychotherapist throughout the community, health centre and hospital, which provide adult, child, adolescence and elderly psychiatric outpatient and inpatient service, liaison for consultation, outreach psychiatric service as well as 24-hour emergency service.
Dr. Ho further pointed out that, to better monitor the status of mental health of the community, crisis detection is also necessary; relevant actions and improvement measures must be taken place as soon as any problem is detected. With his rich education and health consultation experiences and the cooperation of multiple communal institutions on safeguarding the primary and secondary prevention, the number of new outpatient cases has been dropping. Since July this year, a "Community Psychiatric Service Team" has been launched to outreach and proactively seek for potential clients so as to relief the load of the hospitals and all teachers and students of the nursing profession are encouraged to join the force. With the collaborations and works of the interprofessional team and communal institutions, Macao's psychiatric service development has shown its effectiveness and outputs for the mental health of the general public, which is also recognized and awarded by the Macao SAR Government.
Mental Health Nursing is one of the compulsory subjects for nursing students and they are also required to spend hours to neighbouring regions for clinical practice on the subject. One of the attending teachers at the talk commented about the possibility in exploring clinical practice base for psychiatry in Macao so that students are able to understand more about the psychiatric services in Macao. It is also hoped that through such base, more students are attracted to this profession so as to push forward the mental health standard of Macao.