Mental Health
Mental Health
• Mental health issues will affect up to a quarter of the
population at some time during a person's life.
• Approximately one in a hundred people will be in
need of specialist mental health services at any given
time
• The incidence of probable psychotic, neurotic and
personality disorders are all expected to increase at a
rate which is broadly in line with the projected general
population increase
Mental Health
• Our strategic aims remain to help people to stay well
and enjoy good mental health, to make it easy for
people with mental health problems to get the right
help early, to include families and carers in our help
and support, and to provide high quality care to all
those who need it.
• We are committed to ensuring that the physical
health of people with severe and enduring mental
health problems is managed in a timely and effective
manner.
Mental Health
• The national agenda for people with
MH conditions is (where possible) to
facilitate people living in their own
homes either purchased/rented privately
or in a supported living environment
• But there are a cohort of people who
require a higher level of support..
Mental Health transformation:
• Development of a comprehensive range of
appropriate support services to meet the
needs of people with mental health problems.
• Where possible, we seek to do so as close to
home and in the least restrictive environment
possible.
• We will facilitate this by offering person
centred plans of care and reablement and
support services to promote and maintain
independent living.
Care Programme Approach
• The Care Planning Approach (CPA) provides the framework for
multi-agency planning and coordination of care. It has the
service user at its heart and empowers service users to have the
right to live their lives to the full as long as that doesn’t stop
others from doing the same. The approach provides the
framework to agree the network of care that will meet the
person’s needs and make clear who is responsible for the
delivery of this. The CPA such facilitate person centred planning
approaches that identify what is important to a person from his
or her perspective and find appropriate solutions.
Safety
•
•
Within mental health services there are increasingly people with
complex presentations. The cause of these is complex and multifactorial: people may have experienced trauma in their lives, have
treatment resistant conditions or have presentations that are
complicated by issues relating to drug and alcohol misuse. It is
becoming so prevalent that service providers should assume that many
of the people to whom they provide services will be likely to display
behaviours related to these issues. However, it is paramount that
everyone involved in the care of such clients is focussed on ensuring
the safety of the clients as well as other residents, staff as well as the
wider public.
It is essential that the contractor has a skilled staff team to support
people with complex presentations including those whose behaviours
may challenge the services at times. The contractor must work
positively with clinical teams to provide services that are welcoming and
appropriate to people with such complex presentations
Physical Health
People with long term mental health problems have severely reduced life
expectancy and increased risk from a number of preventable long term
health problems. Ensuring that a preventive approach is taken with this
client group is a priority area. Working jointly with other providers, family
carers and health professionals to meet people’s health needs
•Supporting people in the most accessible way possible to make healthy
living choices concerning exercise, diet and lifestyle and are consulted on
the provision of balanced, healthy meals
•Supporting people to access routine health appointments and
interventions, such as dentists, chiropody and opticians
•Assisting people to access primary care screening programmes as
appropriate as well as preventive services, such as flu clinics
•Provide opportunities to make healthy meal choices and to give people
the opportunity to learn skills to enable them plan and prepare healthy
eating options
•To ensure that all clients have access to smoking cessation and nicotine
replacement therapies to facilitate a reduction in known tobacco harms.
Focus on recovery
• Use CPA and person centred approaches to support people to
retain connections with people they know from all parts of their
lives.
• Use CPA and person centred approaches and community
connections to support and enable people to build new
friendships.
• Support people to take part in local activities with the
community.
• Ensure clients are supported to make a positive contribution to
the community, have the opportunity to access paid
employment, voluntary work and further education that leads to
a career path and are supported to have an active social and
leisure life that they choose.
• Be creative around supporting people to learn independent skills
to enable them to live more independently
Focus on recovery
• To move away from institutionalised group arrangements as far
as possible, whatever living situation service users are provided
with
• Enabling people to personalise their living surroundings to
reflect their own tastes and choices
• Enabling people to change their current living environment to
create a personalised home which reflects their lifestyle choices.
• Creating flexibility in the management of the service to enable a
personalised delivery of support plans – this includes flexible
rosters, flexible meal choices and times, looking at changing the
environment to give people the opportunity to learn skills such
as cooking, managing own laundry to staying out late and
inviting friends back for social events.