All roads lead to recovery
In previous times it was said that all roads led to Rome. The challenge for today’s mental health services is for all care pathways to lead to Recovery. Unlike the old Roman Empire, navigating today’s mental health services can be a daunting task with a bewildering number of service options, often with limited clarity as to where each will lead.
Mental Health Strategies have over the years assisted many NHS Trusts and their local partners to redesign their care pathways to ensure they deliver easy access and opportunities for informed choices at all the critical points along the journey - and above all - lead to the individual service user’s sense of their own recovery.
One recent project is the “Your wellbeing in mind” initiative, (see www.yourwellbeinginmind.org.uk), that we are supporting Mersey Care NHS Trust to deliver. This project is redesigning all the Trust’s working age adults and older people’s community mental health service pathways. Like most localities, Mersey Care NHS Trust and their partners grapple with making ‘neat’, desk-based, pathways fit into the complex world of geography, age related services, complex diagnoses, finite resources, and the local and national targets.
The internet and today’s 24/7 culture mean that it is often easier to access products from the other side of the world than it is local services. The changing world means that there is a need to change the culture in which mental health services are delivered, to one that is much more responsive to both the needs and the wishes of its ‘customers’. This isn’t empty consumerism: it is at the core of the values of the NHS and fully in line with Lord Darzi’s aspirations.
he success of the Your Well Being in Mind project will be measured by the degree to which any improvements are aligned to Lord Darzi’s core principles of Fair (equitable access), Effective (do they do what they are supposed to do?), Personal (to each individual service user’s needs) and Safe.
In this context self navigation of services becomes the expectation of service users as most of the time, most service users and their carers know what they need. Service users are becoming much more aware of what they want, and for that matter when and where they want it.
Choice is moving from being a whimsical notion of the few to the perceived right of informed users of services who increasingly expect to choose their own next steps in their own pathway to recovery.
In designing these pathways to recovery, there is a need for services to move beyond purely the access issues, to embrace the equally important later pathway issues of the quality of what happens whilst you are in the services and how quickly you can get out again.
Adopting Lord Darzi’s benchmarks of Fair, Effective, Personal and Safe is a good starting point. How do your services measure up to these standards?
If you would like to know more about how we may be able to help you in redesigning your care pathways please contact Andrew Keefe or telephone 0161 785 1001.
Back to latest news
