Community Mental Health Transformation
This programme aims to develop new and integrated models of primary and community mental health (CMH) care which will support adults and older adults with severe mental illnesses so they have greater choice and control over their care, and be supported to live will in their communities.
How does it work?
The new community-based offer will include access to psychological therapies, improved physical health care, employment support, personalised and trauma-informed care, medicines management and support for self-harm and coexisting substance use and proactive work to address racial disparities.
Who is it for?
The programme drives a renewed focus on people living in their communities with a range of long-term severe mental illnesses, and a new focus on people whose needs are deemed too severe for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services but not severe enough to meet secondary care ‘thresholds’, including for example, eating disorders and complex mental health difficulties associated with a diagnosis of “personality disorder”. There is also a focus on community mental health rehab and reablement.
What is the regional team doing?
In the South East Mental Health Region team we will support local areas to redesign and reorganise core community mental health teams to move towards a new place-based, multidisciplinary service across health and social care aligned with primary care networks and culminating in better patient care.
In 2022/23 we will be focusing on:
- Transforming the workforce currently in Community Mental Health and recruiting additional staff, utilising a range of new roles and initiatives designed to create a multi-disciplinary skilled team around service users. This will include peer support and experts by experience, joint working with primary care, coproduction with Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprises (VCSE), local authority, and public health.
- Increasing the partnership with the VCSE and enabling systems to develop key contracts and innovative approaches
- Supporting systems with developing governance structures for managing complex transformation including clinical leadership and experts by experience.
- Supporting systems to meet all element of the CMH Framework including (but not limited to)
- the move away from the current care programme approach,
- younger and older adult focus,
- embed of physical health checks,
- early intervention services and individual placement and support,
- expansion of dedicated pathways such as eating disorders, rehab, and complex emotional needs,
- increasing access and embed psychological therapies and reducing waiting times and
- development of trusted assessment to stop patients having to retell their story.
- Supporting systems to use outcome measures and other metrics via data quality
- Supporting systems who may be further behind with their transformation to mobilise and increase pace and quality
