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There has been limited evidence on which to base services in the community for people who have intellectual disabilities and coexisting mental health problems. Recent research involving service users, carers and professionals has identified a number of key service components that community services should provide. More detail is needed to explore how best these components could be implemented and delivered. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

A total of 14 multidisciplinary professionals from specialist intellectual disabilities services in the UK were interviewed about their opinions on four key areas of community service provision. These included the review and monitoring of service users, their access to social, leisure and occupational activities, the support, advice and training around mental health for a person's family or carers and “out of hours” and crisis responses. The interview data was used for coding using the NVivo 7 software package and then analyzed using thematic analysis.

Analysis of participants' views on these key essential service components produced wider themes of importance. The ten major emergent themes for services were: their configuration/structure, their clarity of purpose/care pathways, their joint working, their training, their flexibility, their resources, their evidence‐base, being holistic/multidisciplinary, being needs‐led/personalised and providing accessible information.

These views of experts can help inform further research for the development and the evaluation of services.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise the development of a recovery-oriented and socially inclusive acute care clinical psychology service in one of the NHS Trusts based in East Anglia. It demonstrates the service's compliance with relevant national policies and guidelines, and addresses some of the criticisms directed at acute mental health care in recent years. Both achievements and difficulties are reflected on.

The paper employs an organisational development case example related to applicable clinical practice model, based on national guidelines and policies, in order to demonstrate that it is possible to develop and implement a recovery-oriented clinical psychology practice in acute inpatient mental health care. This is based on the authors, experiences as a public sector clinical psychologists specialising in complex, severe, and enduring mental health needs.

Clinical psychologists may effectively contribute to the development of psychosocially informed and recovery-based multidisciplinary attitudes towards emotional difficulties of individuals admitted to psychiatric wards.

Future service development project of similar nature ought to implement standardised measures (e.g. ward atmosphere scales) to increase validity of findings.

Despite limited, and continuously decreasing, resources in the NHS it appears possible to develop and establish a successful and objectively replicable provision of recovery-based psychological services across an entire acute care mental health pathway.

Recovery-enhancing clinical psychology interventions should not be limited to those receiving care from community-based services only. Building psychologically informed understanding of mental health needs should be employed on inpatient wards too, in order to counterbalance the dominating biomedical models of mental illness.

Dissemination of examples of effective psychosocial practice in acute mental health settings appears largely underrepresented.

Peter Relton is employed as a service user development worker in the Bradford Home Treatment Team. His job is to challenge and develop the team ‐ to bring his insights and perspectives to bear on the way they do their work. While some ‘user workers’ operate from a position somewhat apart from the local team, Peter describes an approach that has the potential to knit a service user perspective right into the fabric of mental health services.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the learning from the multi-agency evaluation of the Leeds Dual Diagnosis Care co-ordination protocol undertaken by the Leeds Dual Diagnosis (DD) Project in 2013. The evaluation aimed to identify the prevalence of people with DD accessing network member services, and to identify the standard of care network members provided for people with DD in relation to the Leeds Care Co-ordination Protocol.

The evaluation adopted a service evaluation methodology and included features of real world research. Two standardised self-completion questionnaires were administered using Survey Monkey™ software.

The majority of service could provide prevalence data however the quality of data provided was significantly impacted by the limitations of client management systems. Completion of specific DD training beyond basic awareness was generally low and many participants were confused about the different levels of training available. Standards of care varied, a substantial amount of joint working was taking place via informal pathways which relied on established relationships and trust between practitioners and services. Jointing working was often informal when people were not under the Care Programme Approach.

Due of the methodological choices the evaluation cannot be considered impartial. The prevalence data gathered lacks robustness and does not reflect the number of people who meet clinical threshold for DD as valid screening tools were not used by all services. The standards of care identified only reflect practitioner's personal views and do not provide a definitive answer to the standard of care being delivered. The response rate in relation to standards of care was low with large amounts of missing data negatively impacting the external validity of data gathered.

The completion of this evaluation demonstrates that it is extremely challenging to undertake a multi-agency evaluation with limited resources. It has highlighted key challenges and areas for future development locally in relation to DD. The themes explored are likely to be of interest to commissioners, service managers, DD consultant nurses and anyone involved in the strategic development of DD.

The evaluation has generated information which is of practical significance to local commissioners and Leeds DD Network Members. The knowledge and learning from this evaluation has subsequently been used by the Leeds DD Strategy Group to inform the new action plan for the DD Project, the re-commissioning of substance misuse services and the new mental health framework being developed for Leeds.

This paper gives a picture of the development of four new roles in mental health over a two‐year period. It draws on data from the national mapping project to provide a unique perspective on the emergence of the roles of support, time and recovery workers, gateway workers, carer support workers and community development workers for black and minority ethnic communities. The tracking of such roles on a national level reveals a number of issues, in particular the need for clarity of terms if there is to be an undisputed understanding of what mental health services are provided and by whom.

This paper gives an overview of the development and pilot implementation of a tool to evaluate socially inclusive practice. There are strong links between social inclusion and better mental health outcomes for people who access services, yet a very limited amount of research exists concerning ways to evaluate socially inclusive practice within mental health services. The paper describes the creation of a tripartite tool to access the views of mental health teams who work with service users, and the service users themselves. As part of the movement towards recovery and social inclusion, the Department of Health requires that social and occupational needs become embedded in care plans alongside health needs (DoH, 1999), and so an analysis of care plan documentation completed the evaluation tool. A pilot evaluation was conducted with three mental health teams in Sussex and found issues with engagement and response rate. Lessons learned and future implications are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to describe examples of service user involvement to demonstrate how they can significantly enhance service provision for people with mental health, substance misuse, and co‐existing mental health and substance misuse problems (dual diagnosis), and in so doing, enhance their own recovery.

The personal story of one service user illustrates a range of involvement activities: membership of service user panels, development of an anti‐stigma campaign, mentorship of trust staff, and employment as a peer support worker in both mental health and substance misuse services.

Service provision in mental health and substance misuse services has been enhanced through the genuine involvement of service users. This involvement has been an important factor in building the confidence and skills of service users and supporting them in their own recovery.

The paper describes several innovative involvement initiatives and highlights the dual benefits of these roles to services and the service users employed in them.

The Coventry Community Personality Disorder Service is a new service that has been developed successfully over the past two years, despite several challenges such as real difficulties with recruitment. This is a description of our model, its implementation and some of the emergent issues we encountered along the way.

For over 100 years biomedical psychiatry has dominated the way people throughout the western world understand their sadness and distress, despite the lack of empirical evidence that distress has a biological basis. Now, the interests of the global pharmaceutical industry and trans‐national professional elites such as the World Health Organisation and the World Psychiatric Association are extending these biomedical accounts across the globe. This paper briefly describes biomedical psychiatry and its origins before considering how this project is closely aligned to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. It ends with a call for a new agenda in mental health, driven by the concerns and interests of ordinary people in local communities, and an outline of recent developments in Britain and elsewhere that illustrate this challenge to the biomedical hegemony.