Free Nursing Dissertations - After April 2004, When The First Stages Of The Sap Officially Rolled Out As
After April 2004, when the first stages of the SAP officially rolled out as part of the National Programme, Mrs Singh could equally well have been managed under the terms of the Single Assessment Process. This would have involved the same referral from the passer by. The process would be mechanically and practically quite different. The wording of the Section Two advice (NHS KSF 2004) calls for a:
Multidisciplinary, interagency assessment of their needs ensuring that they receive the relevant services, in an integrated way.
The thinking behind the SAP is clearly that the various agencies should all be aware of the input from the others and be prepared to contribute their own speciality’s input to the situation. They would all share the same basic database and therefore share the same basic information. This would mean that Mrs Singh would only have to be approached on one occasion to hopefully trigger all of the multidisciplinary help that could be made available to her. (Harrison M. 2004)
The modernist would point to the fact that this type of approach would represent a significant increase in efficiency and a reduction in paperwork and stress for Mrs Singh. A thoroughly critical and objective analysis might also consider the rather more old fashioned view, that with her depression due to her social isolation, Mrs Singh might very well have appreciated all the unaccustomed attention from the various members of the primary healthcare team as they all visited, spoke and interacted with her and made their various individual appointments to come back and reconsider their various individual inputs to the situation in the pre-April 2004 regime. This is not a glib point, as many experienced healthcare professionals will attest that for the isolated elderly, the visit of the doctor, the nurse or any of the other healthcare professionals of the primary healthcare team is often considered the social high-spot of their, otherwise humdrum, week.
If we consider a slightly different scenario. Let us consider Mrs.J. who is in exactly the same clinical situation as was Mrs Singh, but her situation has progressed to the point where she is bed-bound with poorly controlled Type II diabetes mellitus and intractable leg ulcers. She is no longer self caring and has to rely on the services of her daughter as her main carer. The daughter is very willing, but has the added strain of having to hold down a responsible job to bring in an income, as well as look after her mother. This has been going on for perhaps two years with minimal input from the primary healthcare team, simply by virtue of the fact that the daughter feels honour bound to do her duty for her mother and is therefore reluctant to ask for, or accept help in any way.
