Ascertaining self-neglect and poor-quality living conditions

Mental health services are often asked to assess people who are found to be living in extreme self-neglect or with extreme hoarding of possessions. We don’t have an adequate way of capturing these assessments in current health records (in order to investigate the situation further); therefore, this project will seek to develop ‘natural language processing’ algorithms (computer code) to highlight when this situation is recorded in text fields like clinical notes or letters. We will then seek to describe characteristics of people in these circumstances and their health outcomes.