Implementing case management in mental health services.

This paper reports the principal findings of an initiative in Wakefield, UK, to implement a case management approach to the resettlement of individuals from a long-stay psychiatric hospital. Nurses and their managers, while welcoming the needs-led, user-centred orientation of such an approach, found some difficulty with it in practice. The principal lesson to be drawn from the experience is that there is still much to learn about case management within the context of British health and social care. Case management is a process, it is not directly concerned with prescribing outcomes.