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How is a patient welcomed into a psychiatric institution and who is responsible? While this question may appear ludicrous, it is nevertheless fundamental. Because it is often in a stage of intense mental suffering that a patient arrives whether they are with their family or not. That moment of crisis needs to be recognised and steered in the right direction.
Depending on the institutions and the situations, how the welcome is organised remains very diverse and encourages some genuine reflection. How to broach dialogue, establish a relationship, implement a strategy beyond the first moments? This is an essential stage of care in psychiatry which is addressed here by psychiatrists and the healthcare team (nurses).
The authors therefore endeavoured to describe actual cases originating from their own practice. They believed this was the best way to relay the relevance that the “Welcome strategy” can have in today’s psychiatry, which carries many significant challenges. Supplemented with a brief historical reminder of practices, it clearly appears that the Welcome is not a simple technique limited to the patient’s arrival but actually one of the many basic arrangements of care in psychiatry.
Organisation, staff training, and provision of information: nothing is trivial when it comes to the Welcome and the institutions or specialist facilities are well aware of this. And to better understand how the Welcome Strategy takes place, the authors wished to compare practices through the experience of French and Swiss institutions.