Page 84 - 2017-2018 Department of Psychiatry Annual Report

Dr. Jason Morrison: Deputy Clinical Director,

Recovery and Integration

Dr. Jason Morrison is the deputy clinical director of team. He also meets with the manager and psychiatry
recovery and integration (R&I). He has held the position group, follows outpatients, and tries to address complaints
since 2014 when he stepped down from his role as deputy and concerns from patients, families and other MH&A
clinical director of acute care. While in acute care, Dr. services.
Morrison could see a major barrier to improving acute
care efficiency. Overall patient care experience required During the last year the greatest challenge faced by Dr.
improvements in access and services in outpatient care. Morrison was trying to continue to improve the service,
In particular, the Recovery & Integration program was despite having had resource allocations and strategic
seeing the toughest patients from acute care transferred to planning authority taken away by the NSHA. “It has been
them while still struggling to define their clinical model, and very frustrating to watch valuable resources wasted for
without dedicated psychiatry leadership time. He proposed several years awaiting government approval for what
creating the position of deputy clinical director of recovery should be common sense local decisions,” he says. “It has
and integration to assist with developing this important deflated momentum we had in modernizing our services.”
service. Dr. Morrison was focused on developing a service With this being said, Dr. Morrison says they have managed
where patients with severe psychotic disorders can receive to create a team that offers standard-of-care, high-quality
the standard of care treatments and supports required psychological interventions for the patient population,
for their illness. With this strategic goal in mind, he has including individual and group CBT, and specific
helped develop a new clinical model for R&I, tried to build interventions around voice hearing, anxiety, and resilience.
co-leadership relationships between the psychiatrists and This was created from scratch, using no new resources
managers, and reorganized the intake process. On a daily and has now offered service to roughly 25 per cent of their
basis he’s involved with the quality team, IPTA (Involuntary patients. “I’m proud to say I think patients in our service
Psychiatric Treatment Act) committee, Central Zone senior have better access to high quality psychotherapy than any
leadership team, and psychiatry senior clinical leadership other group in Nova Scotia.”

84 DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY