‘Not old enough for the dementia service’: Can clinical psychology services be delivered on the basis of patients’ needs rather than their dates of birth?

Abstract

This paper investigates whether two raters could, using information from referral letters, reliably assign patients to one of five pre-defined clinical categories. One category tried to define the ‘typical’ problems seen in adult mental health (AMH). The remaining four covered problems more typical of older adult (OA) work. High rates of agreement between the two raters suggest that most patients can be matched to services on the basis of information in the referral letter.