(PS12-B40) The Role of Inpatient Psychologists in an Integrated Multidisciplinary Setting

The goal of inpatient psychiatric care is to provide holistic care from a biopsychosocial treatment approach which includes psychological services (Evlat, Wood, & Glover, 2021). However, the Care Quality Commission’s (2009) national survey has revealed that in the inpatient setting, “only 29% of service users receive talk therapy.” Moreover, “25% did not receive therapy despite wanting to” because of the unavailability of psychological therapy and predominance of medication treatment (Evlat, Wood, & Glover, 2021). Given the traditional medical model of care, Raphael and colleagues (2021) identified the need for a cultural shift within acute inpatient psychiatric settings to integrate the delivery of evidence-based psychological interventions, including individual and group-based CBT (Raphael et al., 2021). Specifically, CBT for psychosis and other adaptations of CBT relevant to common presenting concerns in the inpatient setting are central to holistic treatment, and we need to understand how to effectively implement them in the acute psychiatric setting. Recent studies have also demonstrated the value of psychologists as an integral part of treatment teams in psychiatric inpatient settings (Woods et al., 2018). However, the current research is limited in better understanding the supporting factors and barriers to implementing psychological services and ways to overcome barriers. In this poster, we identify supportive factors as well as the challenges of providing psychological intervention and services within an integrated multidisciplinary psychiatric inpatient setting. We then go on to propose solutions to the identified challenges, to enhance and expand the application of CBT in an integrated multidisciplinary setting.