What does this mean? It is not entirely clear and it is certainly not clear how this new single-focussed Camden & Islington Mental Health Trust will differ substantially from the present C&I Community Trust. It will be a new Trust (whose name is not quite clear yet) with a new Chief Executive and a new Trust Board. All this has to be done swiftly for the new Trust to be in existence by 1^st April 2001.

What will it mean to services? It should not mean any real and noticeable change. It’s about management rather than anything else. The present arrangement where the Royal Free Mental Health Services are run under a Service Level Agreement will cease to exist and North Camden Mental Health Service will be part of the new Trust.

There are interesting questions. Will there be a Borough Director for each of the Boroughs? Will the new Trust move ahead of Government thinking and have a service user on its Board? What will it mean for user involvement?

Unfortunately, for the moment we can only speculate. The Camden Bugle will bring you all the news that is relevant as soon as it knows it. 

From the very beginning there were substantial problems with the Out of Hours Service. Many thought it unlikely that those people who did not use Day Services during the day were suddenly going to want to use them in the evenings and at weekends. .

CMHC had two Christmas events in December. The one a party with music at Lyndhurst Hall, which was a new development for CMHC and brought along some people that we had not seen before. Much of thanks for this event must go to Hugh Sturrock, who helped arranged it, took part in the cabaret and was the DJ for the evening.

The Annual Christmas Meeting/Party was held on December 20 at The St Pancras Conference Centre. It also served as the concluding chapter in last year’s Annual General Meeting. The Minutes of the two previous meetings in June and September were accepted and the meeting moved on to fill the vacancies on the Management Committee. There were originally two places, but Diana Foley resigned and that made three and Penny Abraham felt that she must step down as a Management Committee Member because of potential conflicts in her work as a Councillor.

CMHC must pay tribute to Diana Foley for all the work that she has done. Diana continues to play an important role in the mental health world in Camden. She may no longer be on the CMHC Management Committee but she will still continue with many other tasks, including working as an advocate at St Luke’s Hospital.

So there were four positions on the Management Committee to be filled and there were four able candidates to fill them: Mary Ejieone, Sabita Dewdney, Des Marshall and Malti Zaveri. This brings the Management Committe up to full strength again.

Although Penny Abraham resigned as a Management Committee Member, she returns to the Committee as its appointee from the London Borough of Camden in accordance with section 6 of the Constitution.

Once the formal business of the evening had been concluded, Colin Plant, Sandra Miller and Kirte Hunte talked about the new South Camden Crisis Response and Resolution Service and the plans to include a service user in the team.

It was then time for the food and drink. But there was one more task to be undertaken by the Mayor of Camden, Councillor Heather Johnson, who has been a strong supporter of CMHC during her Mayoral term. She drew the raffle prizes which had been generously donated by Sainsbury’s in Camden, Waitrose in the Finchley Road and Argos in the Finchley Road. Some people went home having had a good time and with a prize.

CMHC is grateful to South Camden Mental Health Service and its Locality Director, Colin Plant, for providing the venue and the refreshments for our Christmas Party.

In a year when the AGM had to be adjourned twice, it was a relief to have it finished at last. But the world never stops. Having only just concluded the business of one Annual General Meeting, we must now think about the next one. This year the AGM will be held in The Sir William Wells Atrium at The Royal Free Hospital on Tuesday, 24 July, commencing at 6.00 pm. Full details of the meeting and the nomination forms for Trustees will be sent out in the necessary time together with some information about the duties and responsibilities of the Trustees so that potential Trustees may know what is expected of them. The Trustees are the body that is responsible for the running of CMHC and for the expenditure of its funds. The current position is that the Members of the Management Committee are the Trustees of the organisation and there are twelve of them, four of whom are CMHC’s Honorary Officers. There is now also an appointee from Camden Council.

At the Christmas Meeting, the Chair flagged up two points in the constitution which the Management Committee feel should be changed.

At present no one under 18 years of age may be become a member. At this time of inclusiveness, when mental health problems seem to occur even younger it is felt that this is an unfortunate exclusion and so we should do away with the lower age limit.

With the possibility that real work for service users is going to become a more regular occurrence and that CMHC will be commissioned to undertake this work, the members of the Management Committee find themselves in the position of not being able to undertake any of these tasks because it would be a breach of their trusteeship. This seems unfair. We are proposing to ask the Charity Commission if they will allow us to add a clause to the constitution where in certain circumstances trustees may undertake paid work commissioned by CMHC.

People will have seen the 'REAL WORK for REAL PAY' advertisements. This is the first piece of work which has been commissioned for service users to earn money for the work that they do. Five service users have been recruited as development workers to do some research into the kind of crisis house model that would be favoured by service users in Camden. This work will take place over eight weeks and will be co-ordinated by CMHC. The development workers will be designing a questionnaire and interviewing other service users.

This is something that The Bugle will report on as it develops. We hope that it will form a model for the future of service-user involvement and is part of a three-stranded approach – reward, support and training – in which CMHC feels the process needs to develop. This is in line with recent Government thinking as set out in the NHS Plan.

The Joint Mental Health and Learning Difficulties Partnership Board is the new form in which the London Borough of Camden and the Camden and Islington Community Health Services NHS Trust governs the work undertaken by the various services, including adult mental health in the borough. At its meeting on 18 January, it received a deputation from four members of CMHC concerned about how user involvement could be taken forward. The deputation concerned itself with the structure and the means of user involvement, recommending that the investment in the current structures, the North and South Camden User Forums, should be continued and that a Borough Reference Group should be established. It also advised that proper training should be made available for those service users who wish to become involved and that investment should be made in those people. Most importantly, it wanted user involvement to be properly funded, because without this it will never be really effective. These ideas come partly from the work that CMHC continues to undertake and from what people said at the User Event in November. In essence, CMHC wanted ‘ownership’ of user involvement to lie with users and not to have it as something handed down from above as ‘the way that it should be done’.

It is too early yet to know how much influence these ideas will have, but CMHC will continue the work that it has begun to establish proper training for service users with some recognised validation at the end of it. It is also involved in trying to improve the advocacy resources within the borough, again in line with Government thinking, and would like to see proper training courses for advocates set up with an end qualification. This is almost certainly an idea which will have to be developed if the PALS (Patient Advocacy and Liaison Service) described in the NHS plan are going to work.

At the end of the User Event in November, we promised that when the report on the day was produced we would make copies available to people and we would then arrange a further event at which the report could be considered and the way forward mapped out. We are expecting the report from Advocacy Really Works by the end of January. We are arranging the feedback event for Tuesday, 27 March. It will be a two-tiered afternoon commencing with lunch. The first part of the afternoon will concern itself with the report and how we can take the recommendations that have come out of the User Event forward. This will be followed by a debate on the proposals in the recent White Paper on Reforming the Mental Health Act. We will invite two speakers, one in favour of the more restrictive approach put forward by the Government and one against, and then we will have a general discussion on the proposals. This event is going to be held in the Hampstead Town Hall in Belsize Park, which is the headquarters of CMHC.

The North Camden User Forum has been one of the successes of user involvement as far as CMHC is concerned. During 2000 it met each month, usually to hear a speaker discuss a topic in the mental-health field and to carry on the discussion on that point. It usually has attendances of around ten and sometimes it has attracted more than twenty people. It is well established. However, like everything else, it can only continue if it is funded. Over the past two years both the North and South Camden User Forums have been funded from Mental Health Grant underspend – the money left over at the end of each year. We feel that they are important enough to have their own dedicated funding and that this should be part of the investment in user involvement.

More than a year ago and following a North Camden User Forum meeting at which Professor Michael King talked about research in psychiatry, a small group of researchers from the Academic Department of Psychiatry at The Royal Free Hospital and CMHC members began meeting regularly to discuss how service users could have an input into that research and learn more about it. It was from this group that the Stigma Project originated, and it is hoped that a researcher will be employed to begin the work on this in the Spring of this year. At the January meeting of the NCUF, Dr Scott Weich came along to talk about how users could have an input into research and about some of the projects that are currently under way.

The time and dates of the NCUF for this year have already been set. It will continue to meet on the first Tuesday of each month at 4.30 pm in Room 20 of the Psychotherapy Corridor on the 2^nd-floor of the RFH Tower Block. The next meeting will be on Tuesday, 6 February, and part of it will be taken up with Keith Russell, the Assistant Locality Director (Health) at North Camden Mental Health Service talking about the proposals to set up Patients’ Councils for the in-patient units on level 2 and Felix Brown and Fordwych Road Day Hospitals.

2000 was not a particularly good year for the South Camden User Forum. Although it met several times during the year, it was not successful in attracting people. Towards the end of the year, the attendance became so poor that we actually considered abandoning it. As so often happens, this led to more people coming to the last couple of meetings in the year and so we decided that we would try again in 2001.

There is a clear need for a User Forum in South Camden. We are trying to establish the South Camden User Forum to undertake that role. We have now managed to arrange that for the first three months of the year at least, it will have fixed dates and times and a fixed venue. During January, February and March it will meet at Jules Thorn Day Hospital on the last Tuesday of the month from 5.30 to 7.00 pm. Tea, coffee and sandwiches will be provided.

Perhaps the most important development in South Camden at the moment is the establishment of the South Camden Crisis Response and Resolution Service. This will be in operation towards the end of this month. The first SCUF meeting of 2001 on Tuesday, 30 January will provide people with an opportunity to meet the Crisis Team and discuss their work with them and to take further the problem of how best to involve a service user in that team.

One of the first decisions made by the South Camden Locality Management Advisory Group was that it would visit the sites at which mental health services are provided.

It started off by visiting Jules Thorn Day Hospital and listening to representations from the Patients’ Council, as a result of which improvements were made to the environment at the Day Hospital. Its second visit was to Barnes House, headquarters of Mind In Camden, where it heard service users praise the staff there and request more services.

This month’s LMAG visit was to St Luke’s Hospital. It is sometimes easy to forget that St Luke’s, which is actually in the neighbouring borough of Haringey, is a South Camden facility. It is in a green-field setting and it is hard not to appreciate what a value this must be. The visit was to Montague Ward which is the rehabilitation ward and where residents seemed satisfied with the service that they were receiving. It was the day before the Mental Health Act Commissioners were due to visit so there may be more to say after their report is available.

The South Camden LMAG meets five times each year, and its next meeting in March will be at the Huntley Centre. It will have had the benefit of the report from the Mental Health Act Commissioners who visited the Huntley Centre recently.

The purpose of the LMAG is to deal with any issue relating to mental health services in its area. The South Camden LMAG already has service user representation, but it is presently considering inviting two users from the South Camden User Forum to join it. Clearly the more user representation that it has the more it will be able to reflect users views and needs.

In the Christmas Issue (No:40 ) of The Camden Bugle, Des Marshall said that In His View the opening hours at New Directions Camden should be altered to more suitably match the needs of users. Here Carine Jones, an NDC service user, supports that view and asks that the decision of the members be put in place sooner rather than later. 

I support fully Des Marshall’s views about the opening hours at NDC’s Jamestown Day Centre in the In My View column in The Christmas Camden Bugle.

Jamestown’s present opening hours do not meet the needs of the members. A questionnaire was circulated in which members were asked to choose between three options. The outcome was that 10.00 am to 5.00 pm were the opening times which members would prefer.