A new approach to caring for people with mental health problems in Co Monaghan has been so successful that the WHO is using it as a model for community-based care in Albania.
The North Eastern Health Board (NEHB) introduced it as a pilot programme in Co Monaghan in 1988; it has now been extended to include Cavan and will shortly be introduced in the rest of the region.
The core of its ethos is to avoid admitting people to psychiatric hospitals because of the stigma attached to this as well as the high number of readmissions, which indicated the system, as it was, was not successful.
"It is always harder to get out of hospital than to get in and nobody is admitted to a psychiatric hospital if we can help it," said Mr Damien Murray, the director of nursing in Cavan and Monaghan for the NEHB.
Its success was recognised outside Ireland, and it is now commonplace to find nurses and doctors from other European countries visiting the teams of professionals implementing the programme in the north-east.
"We give people the choice of whether we treat them in hospital or have one of our home based teams visit them. By doing this we really turned the system on its head and took the "hospital" out to people with our home-based teams which can provide acute services to them."