Community Mental Health Transformation

Older Adults: An Organic and Functional Pathway's paper was presented and approved at the Community Senior Management Group.

Communications, Digital and Engagement: Content continues to be developed for inclusion in the stakeholder newsletter. A transformation animation has been co-produced with our lived experience colleagues and aims to give insight into the transformation and the positive impact the changes will bring.

Access and Egress: Several task and finish groups have been meeting to review their aligned objectives prior to the next workstream meeting. The task and finish groups are reviewing the Naming of Services, Primary Care Access and Referrals/Pathways, Moving on Plan/Discharge, Transfers of Care, DNA process and Management and Rapid Access. A task and finish group has also been established to look at Clinical Harm Reviews.  

Patient Access Times: A small group are reviewing the outpatient process and aim to establish guidance on how appointments are currently managed and identify the next steps, this will be discussed at the next meeting. Lots of work has been completed around waiting list recovery times, with the reporting process for the monthly meeting standardised and targets/KPIs set. Some CMHTs have had success in relation to the 4-week RTT and colleagues from these teams have been invited to the meeting to share their learning. There is also a request for engagement with the Rio system to implement changes to enable our physical health colleagues to report in the same way.

CERT: CERT team launch day is scheduled for 29 November. The group continue to map out of area placements. Operational meetings with the Integrated Care Board and local authorites will start in November.

Intervention Based Care: A bi-monthly Homelessness task and finish group has been established. The group have agreed a focus on the Psychosis pathway and have been working in collaboration with colleagues in the Urgent Care team to establish what this pathway looks like currently. The group will then consider the pathway as a whole, once achieved the group will then add review another diagnosis pathway.

Workforce: A workforce redesign day was held on the 1 November with colleagues from CMHTs, finance, human resources and allied health professions. The group discussed establishing a baseline assessment of our existing workforce.

CPA to CMHF: The membership of this group has been extended, the project plan and agenda reviewed and will enable the group to move through each of the phases with pace and with a clear direction and focus.

Lived Experience: Interviews are scheduled in November to appoint seven peer support lived experience workers. Interview preparation has been done in collaboration with our lived experienced senior peer support workers and inclusion colleagues. These roles will be embedded within CMHTs across our footprint, and team managers have been invited to a workstream meeting where they will be presented an insight into the peer support worker role and responsibilities and the support available to them to make sure they are fully equipped to support our new colleagues in these roles.   

A well developed programme of work has been delivering for the last four years. Key areas include access to our services, transition from our services and intervention based care. Benefits achieved so far include:

• Improved relationships with our external partners
• Work with primary care including more than 50 Additional Role Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) practitioners recruited
• Move away from Care Programme Approach (CPA) to personalised care
• Caseload management 24% reduction
• Waiting list for first contact reduction from circa 60 weeks (September 2020) to under seven weeks average (October 2023)
• Development and integration of a Lived Experience Team.