Updates in this edition include:
We would like to advise you of the mental health and social care conference ‘Working together for better mental health’ taking place on Wednesday 29th February 2012. The event will show-case priority areas in mental health for London including some of the work of the mental health team. The event will also include a keynote speech from Dr Hugh Griffiths, National Clinical Director for Mental Health. Invitations to colleagues across health and social care will be sent out shortly.
We’re also pleased to announce the launch of our facebook webpage which will hold links, documents and videos about our project work. To sign up please visit the Mental Health team facebook page.
Finally, on behalf of London Health Programmes mental health team, we would like to wish you a restful time over the holiday season and a happy 2012.
As part of the work to support the implementation of the mental health models of care, the project team has been working with the NHS London 111 team to ensure the new NHS 111 service supports those with an urgent mental health need. The NHS 111 Programme aims to make it easier for the public to access urgent healthcare and also drive improvements in the way that the NHS delivers the care. The easy to remember, free to call 111 number will clinically assess callers during their first contact and direct them to the right local service, first time.
For people in London with a need for urgent mental health support, NHS 111 will provide a co-ordinated approach to help them to access the right support as quickly as possible.
NHS 111 services use a consistent clinical assessment triage system, NHS Pathways, for triaging telephone calls from the public, based on the symptoms they report when they call. For this to work to maximum benefit, a robust and accurate Directory of Services (DoS) is required to support the NHS Pathways system. The DoS is the database of available commissioned services to which patients with urgent care needs can be referred, and will provide the NHS 111 call handler with real time information about services available to support someone. The DoS will also provide health professionals, such as GPs, with the means to find and refer people to the most appropriate local services through QuickSearch – a powerful DoS tool.
Commissioners and providers of mental health services are currently submitting information about services to support people with an urgent mental health need. As the system develops other relevant mental health services will be included in the DoS.
Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) is a payment framework which enables commissioners to reward excellence, by linking a proportion of healthcare providers’ income to the achievement of local quality improvement goals. Last year a CQUIN to improve physical health assessment and treatment for those using secondary mental health services was used widely across London resulting in progress towards improving this.
The commissioning cluster mental health leads and Geraldine Strathdee, the Associate Medical Director—mental health at NHS London, have asked the mental health team at London Health Programmes to co-ordinate the development of the mental health CQUINs for London for 2012/13. The team are working with a range of experts to build on previous CQUINs and develop new goals. This work will be completed over the next two months and will then be available to be used by commissioners in the commissioning and contracting negotiations with providers for 2012/13.
The Cluster Chief Executives have asked, via David Smith as London mental health SRO, the Mental Health team at London Health Programmes (LHP) to co-ordinate a London Wide Mental Health Commissioning Intentions document for the 2012/13 commissioning round that will sit alongside local docu-ments and the London Wide Acute and London Ambulance Service documents.
The aim of the document is to set out the issues and areas of development such as mental health Payment by Results that will be common across Lon-don in 2012/13 and will complement local mental health commissioning intentions documents.
Comments on the draft document were received from mental health leads and mental health commissioners across London and will be finalised during December.
The Mental Health PbR team are currently developing a package of training ma-terials aimed at commissioners, contractors, Clinical Commissioning Groups and other health professionals concerned with the implementation of PbR and will be rolled out to clusters in early January 2012.
The recruitment of a clinical lead, who will work on a specific project related to the validation of the PbR care clusters across the region is currently underway. The successful candidate will also act as a liaison between the London Currency Development Board, the mental health trusts, and the SHA’s medical directorate to inform on the progress of PbR implementation.
The project team are arranging a Mental Health Commissioner Collaborative meeting in January 2012 to focus on the requirements for mental health contracts in 2012/13.
Full details of the above and other work of the mental health PbR team, such as the presentations from the Collaborative held in December, can be found in the Mental Health PbR and Outcomes project e-Bulletin released this month, a link to which can be found in the Important links and documents section of this newsletter.
The NHS Operating Framework for 2012/13 strongly refers to improving access to psychological therapies as part of the NHS commitment to full rollout by 2014/15 so that services remain on track to meet at least 15% of disorder prevalence, and achieve recovery rates of at least 50% in fully established IAPT services. During 2012/13 this will mean increased access for black and minority ethnic groups and older people, and increased availability of psychological therapies for people with severe mental illness and long term health problems.
In order to meet 15% need the Department of Health (DH) expects all sites to be able to meet a minimum of 5% need in the current financial year. Those sites unable to do so and underperforming against operating plan trajectories have been rated red by DH. In a letter sent to Cluster CEOs on 16th No-vember, NHS London identified 15 sites that are underperforming by 5% against the operating plan trajectories that were submitted earlier in 2011. Clus-ter Directors of Performance are charged with signing off individual recovery plans to be returned to NHS London by 14th December.
It is worth noting that many of these services are not operationally underperforming and that the issues are predominantly related to either staff capacity, resourcing and over ambitious trajectories.
Recovery plans should consider the following points:
Clara Lewis for the:
Robin Partridge for the:
Becky Ozman for the:
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