Across Mental Health: Mental Health Services

Across mental health:
Policy watch:
Across mental health

Areas of work:
Recovery +

Mental Health Services

Mental health services that are available in the community or in hospital are still important to our work.

New Horizons

We welcome the vision of better mental health and better support for people with mental health problems contained within New Horizons.

Those aspirations will only be achieved in practice if government articulates a clear statement of what it expects public services to be able to offer by 2020 and if it prioritises evidence-based approaches.

Our response to the consultation focuses on actions that government can take immediately to put those ideas into practice, based on work we have carried out. They include:

Develop early intervention services for children and families to prevent conduct problems from a young age;
Improve mental health support for people in the youth justice system;
Implement evidence-based support for people with severe or enduring mental health problems to gain and keep paid employment;
Implement the Bradley Report's recommendations, in particular for the creation of Criminal Justice Mental Health teams across England;
Ensure that mental health services genuinely focus on recovery for all of their service users.
Take action to improve the mental health of the whole of the NHS workforce.

In addition to these immediate actions, we believe government should investigate how to make much-needed improvements in areas where the evidence is currently less clear-or well developed. They include:

Tackling the high cost of forensic mental health services;
Intervening effectively to address common mental health problems at work;
Improving the employment prospects of offenders with mental health problems.

You can read our full response to New Horizons below.

Our response to the New Horizons consultation - October 2009 (223 KB)

NHS Constitution

With the Mental Health Foundation, Mind, Rethink, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Together, we have responded to the consultation on a constitution for the NHS.

We support and welcome the majority of what has been proposed, but have suggested a few additions, such as adding recovery as a principle for all services and enabling service users, carers and families to be actively involved in all aspects of their care.

Many aspects of the constitution are particularly important to mental health service users such as the creation of a legal right to treatments approved by NICE (including many psychological therapies and evidence-based employment support) and the pledge to provide information about available health care services. You can read the full response below.

Download NHS Consultation response (132 KB)

Leadership and performance of Crisis Resolution Teams

This is a national project that aimed to understand what combinations of leadership factors are associated with the effective development and delivery of Crisis Resolution Teams.

We also looked at quality of leadership, team effectiveness, team morale and fidelity to the service model. This 3-year project is funded by the National Collaborating Centre for Service, Delivery and Organisation.

We did this research with Prof Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe and Dr John Alban-Metcalfe - Real World Group. For more information contact John Alban-Metcalfe on mailto:john.albanmetcalfe@realworld-group.com.

Smoking cessation for people with mental health problems

We have collaborated with QUIT, the national stop smoking charity, to pilot a proactive and tailor-made telephone counselling service for smokers with mental health problems to help them reduce the amount they smoke or stop smoking altogether.

Health care professionals and other relevant community based personnel received training to offer stop smoking interventions and appropriate referrals for smokers with mental health problems. Existing QUIT telephone counsellors also received training in mental health awareness. They have offered help, via a specialist telephone or email support service, that complements local interventions.

The pilot programme has now finished and you can download the final report below.

Download the QuitNow project final report (694 KB)

QUIT will continue to offer this intervention and you can see more detailed information by visiting their website at www.quit.org.uk.

The Future Regulation of Health and Social Care

We responded to the Department of Health's consultation on the Future Regulation of Health and Social Care in England (February 2007). It included proposals to merge the three organisations responsible for regulating healthcare, adult social care and the operation of the Mental Health Act.

Download our response to the Regulation consultation (Word, 37 KB)