Effective prevention through promoting healthy lifestyles among psychiatric patients.

People with mental illnesses often have an unhealthy lifestyle, including poor diet, nicotine consumption, physical inactivity and drug use. Sometimes medication reinforces unhealthy behavioral patterns. This is the case with patients who make prolonged use of for example antipsychotics. Those patients are twice as likely to be obese as the average person end are more suffering from metabolic syndrome, and putting them at substantially higher risk of diabetes and cardiovasculair disease. Somatic screening in combination with lifestyle intervention can help control the prevalence of somatic complications for these patients

To ensure mental health care institutions pay adequate attention to physical health, the Ministry of health care formulated criteria that institutions must meet. These criteria are also known as the building blocks and include policy, training of health care providers, systematic screening of physical health, lifestyle intervention, psycho education and patient record. The Reinier van Arkel Group, a mental healthcare institution in the Netherlands, implemented the building blocks in their hospital through developing a procedure in which attention the physical health is guaranteed. This procedure describes what the health care worker should do and is applied to all patients. Part of the procedure is systematic screening of the physical health care en applying lifestyle interventions. In addition, group therapies such as smoking cessation training are provided.

This training is offered to both patients and staff.