Search results

The national policy Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health (Department of Health, 2005) is in its fifth and final year. Evidence suggests that the changes that were hoped for have not been achieved. This has raised the question as to whether the objectives were unattainable or whether the implementation is yet to see the leadership that is required to bring change in a field fraught with emotion and soured optimism. Drawing on engaging leadership theories and the concept of organisational incompetence this paper highlights key requirements for change, including giving a focus on what has gone well, for example through using appreciative inquiry, and on pursuing possibilities beyond those prescribed through performance management.

Two learning sets have been established for senior managers who are responsible for social care in what are traditionally health service organisations. For the future health and welfare of wider society and the economy it is vital that mental health remains part of the local authority agenda and that social perspectives, care and inclusion become an integral part of the ‘health’ agenda.This article explores the value of the two learning sets, one supported by NIMHE and the second by SCIE, to its participants and the organisations that they serve.

The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding how, even in the absence of identifiable racist behaviours by white people and predominantly white institutions, African Caribbean people can suffer detriment to their mental health due to toxicity in interactions.

This paper was developed through a desktop review of literature that analyses the factors that cause the sustained variation in experience and outcome in mental health for people from African Caribbean backgrounds.

Prior experiences of personalised racism (interpersonal and institutional) and an awareness of non‐personalised racism in society creates conditions which mean that African Caribbean people experience toxicity in their dealings with white people and white institutions, including mental health services. This is detrimental to service user outcomes.

The paper provides a language for the process that leads to negative outcomes for African Caribbean people in mental health services resulting from interactions with white people or white institutions even in the absence of racism or racist events directed at them.

This paper describes a project that moves away from a transactional model of leadership to a shared model of leadership, across health professionals from different organisations, to address health inequalities among deprived black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in Walsall in the West Midlands region of England. Traditional models of leadership can tend to focus on individuals and do not take into account the fact that patient care usually involves a number of staff from several organisations. The project was designed to test the hypotheses that provision of structured support to teams using a shared leadership model would lead to improvements in partnership working and patient outcomes. The project showed significant improvements in partnership working and enabled greater engagement with the BME communities in Walsall. The paper explores the strengths and weakness of the shared leadership model and the challenges in translating the vision into reality.