Agenda item
MENTAL HEALTH: CRISIS CARE CONCORDAT
Lead Officer: Carrie Kilpatrick
The report provides a progress update on the local action plan that has been developed in response to the Government’s inter-agency Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat.
Recommendation:
To note the report
Minutes:
Carrie Kilpatrick, Interim Deputy Director of Mental Health and Joint Commissioning presented a power point presentation on the Mental Health Concordat, a national agreement between services and agencies involved in the care and support of people in crisis. The concordat set out how organisations would work together better to make sure that people received the help they needed when they had a mental health crisis.
It was noted that in February 2014, 22 national bodies involved in health, policing, social care, housing, local government and the third sector came together and signed the Crisis Care Concordat. Since then five more bodies had signed the Concordat, making a total of 27 national signatories.
The Concordat focused on four main areas:
· Access to support before crisis point – making sure people with mental health problems could get help 24 hours a day and that when they asked for help, they were taken seriously.
· Urgent and emergency access to crisis care – making sure that a mental health crisis was treated with the same urgency as a physical health emergency.
· Quality of treatment and care when in crisis – making sure that people were treated with dignity and respect, in a therapeutic environment.
· Recovery and staying well – preventing future crises by making sure people were referred to appropriate services.
It was expected that the Mental Health Care Crisis Concordat document would ensure that local Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWB) would bring together health and social care commissioners, the local community and wider partners, and support the crisis care concordat through their Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategies (JHWS). Joint working should include people who had experienced mental health crisis.
The document set out certain requirements, including governance for action plans, and key areas to address (care pathways, resources, transient populations, drug and alcohol services and children young people). However, the key requirement is for HWBs to meet local circumstances and needs highlighted in the JSNA.
Local health and social care commissioners were expected to develop their own commissioning plans in line with any relevant JSNA or JHWS, and must be able to justify any parts of their plans which were not consistent with these.
Local partnership working and oversight of the strategic direction of mental health crisis care were therefore the key issues for Tower Hamlets Health and Wellbeing Board.
It was noted that to date, the Health and Wellbeing Board had adopted a Joint Mental Health Strategy, which, as part of its commitment to high quality services, has prioritised crisis resolution and a review of crisis pathways. This has laid a strong foundation for future partnership work.
The Tower Hamlets Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat action plan (Appendix 2) was agreed in March 2015 by the CCG, the Council, East London Foundation Trust (ELFT), Barts Health, the London Ambulance Service and The Metropolitan Police, and supported by eight local third sector organisations.
It was noted that he key messages for the Health and Wellbeing Board was that the Borough mental health services were good although it could be improved further. The following actions would be developed into specific project plans:
· Improve service user and carer experience of mental health crises at the Royal London Hospital Emergency Department;
· Obtain feedback from service users and carers with experience of local crisis services, and review options for improvement (with reference to the principle thatPeople in crisis, and the carers of people in crisis, should be treated with dignity and respect and their expertise listened to);
· Develop improved on-line access to information and services through the In the Know on-line information service (on the Idea Store;
· Audit crisis plans and CPA plans (including for older adults) and reduce variability in quality;
· Reduce proportion of mental health crises where police are first to attend;
· Continue to ensure good response times and high quality services from LAS for Mental Health Act call-outs, and work to reduce inappropriate emergency ambulance crisis call-outs;
· Develop a mental health urgent care and crisis care dashboard, including monitoring ethnicity and age; and
· Engage service users and carers in monitoring the delivery of services according to expectations.
In line with wider NHS England priorities, the CCG had also been able to invest additional resources into the Early Intervention Service, which would increase the speed of response and offer NICE compliant interventions to people with their first experience of psychotic illness.
The NHS London Strategic Clinical Networks had drawn up commissioning standards and recommendations which will be considered when developing specific service proposals.
A senior partners group was in the process of being set up from the named signatories or their nominees to draw up detailed plans to improve support police and ambulance response, and to propose improvements at the Royal London Hospital Emergency Department.
This group would also oversee timelines and progress on the other actions, such as the dashboard and the audit of crisis plans.
The Mental Health and Joint Commissioning Team had already engaged with service users to plan focus groups and surveys on service user experience, and to develop the content of an on-line information resource.
RESOLVED –
That the report be noted.
Supporting documents: