Assertive Community Treatment Team
Assertive Community Treatment Team
The Assertive Community Treatment Team (ACTT) is a client-centred, recovery-oriented mental health service delivered by mental health professionals, designed to provide comprehensive, community-based psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation, and support to persons with serious and persistent mental illnesses that are complex and cause significant functional impairments. ACTT promotes an individual’s right to self-determination, empowerment, and choice. The program assists clients to achieve personal goals, improve health and quality of life, and live as independently as possible in the community.
Program Services
ACTT is a multidisciplinary team, which includes administrative staff, concurrent disorders specialist, nurses, an occupational therapist, psychiatrists, social worker, social service worker, vocational specialists, peer specialist, and mental health professionals. Interdisciplinary mental health professionals work in partnership with clients living with serious and persistent mental illness.
The team works with clients to develop recovery goals – they help with housing, education, volunteering or employment opportunities, life skills, relationships, and community integration. The team works closely with other care providers including family physicians, staff from supportive housing agencies, and inpatient teams to facilitate individualized treatment goals. ACTT provides clinical services, ongoing assessment of mental health concerns, treatment, monitoring, and promotes medication compliance as required. Services are most often delivered in the person’s home or locations within the community that promote comfort and convenience to the individual. Direct client services are available daily, seven days per week and an emergency after-hours on-call system is available for active clients.
Program Eligibility
ACTT services are designed for adults 18 – 65 years of age with long-term psychiatric disabilities. Priority is given to people with long-term mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder, as these illnesses often cause long-term disability, frequent and lengthy psychiatric hospitalizations and disrupt community living and the individual’s potential to “recover”. Additionally, persons living with serious mental illness may have coexisting substance abuse disorders, difficulty with basic survival needs, and are unable to participate in traditional, office-based or case-management services as highly integrated and individualized services are required.
Persons living with a serious mental health illness often have complex needs and find it difficult to engage in other mental health services, therefore an assertive approach to care is required. A Referral Screening Tool is utilized to promote fidelity to the ACTT model and to determine if the person requires services that are more appropriately treated by other specialized services.
Program Referrals
Referrals to H.P.E.C. ACTT can be made through: Central Intake – Canadian Mental Health Association – Hastings Prince Edward
Assertive Community Treatment Team (ACTT)
250 Sydney Street, Belleville, Ontario K8N 3Z3, Unit #131
Phone: 613 962-0259
Fax: 613-962-5615
Email: hpeactt@qhc.on.ca