Monthly Newsletter of Camden Mental Health Consortium |
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ISSUE 54 |
FEBRUARY 2002 |
Much of the rhetoric in the Government’s new consumer society is centered around empowerment. Until you know your rights you cannot enforce them. The same must be true in mental health. How can you know what the medicines will do and what their side effects are if you are not given that information? How can you ask for an assessment if you do not know that you have that right? How do you know what services maybe available to you if you don’t know where to look? Any user involvement structure must provide the information that people need to make that involvement effective. To do this effectively we need to have a central resource which is open to service users and where they can find the answers to their questions or discover the questions to ask. One of the things that we should be seeking is such a Resource Centre and if they seriously want service-user involvement this is one of the essential things that the Statutory Services should be funding.
A
new phrase seems to have come into use ‘Ward in the Community’.
This would seem to be a Crisis House run on the Medical Model,
something similar Drayton Park operated by the statutory services. It
was very clear from the responses to the Crisis House Questionnaire that
this is not what service users in Camden are looking for in the Camden
Crisis House.
They wanted a place run by the voluntary sector with as little
medical input as possible.
They wanted to get away from wards, in hospital or anywhere else. WHAT
ARE THEY
TALKING
ABOUT? All
trades and professions have their own language – plumbers, car
mechanics, policemen and doctors.
It is their way of establishing their own trade with its secrets
and keeping outsiders on the outside.
It works very well at achieving this. However,
if you invite outsiders in then it is imperative that they are given
access to the code.
All the jargon and acronyms used in the mental health system serve
to prevent effective user involvement. It
is good to hear that someone from the Jules Thorn Patients’ Councils is
preparing a dictionary of jargon and acronyms.
We welcome this and think that someone should provide some money to
enable the work to continue and be published. LAUGHTER’s
LOSS Spike
Milligan’s anarchic humour did not appeal to everyone and there were
those who thought it was unfunny. But there are few people who could say
that he was not extremely influential in his work.
Hs death is not just a loss to comedy.
New Appointments The
Mental Health Trust’s new Service User Resource Centre is at 60 Bath
Street, London EC1V 9DP. Currently
the staff is made up of the Service User Involvement Co-ordinator and the
Project Manager for the Service User Employment Programme. CMHC
is pleased to welcome to the new posts: Angela
Hall is the Service User Involvement Co-ordinator.
She has been actively involved in the User Movement for a number of
years and was Chair of the Waterlow Unit Patients’ Council.
Angela can be contacted on 0207 530 2744 or e-mailed:
angela.hall@cichs-tr.nthames.nhs.uk.
Bruce
Buckmaster has taken on the post of Project Manager for the Service User
Employment Programme. Bruce
has experience as a mental health advocate with the Assert Advocacy
Project and a background in business and the private sector.
Bruce can be contacted on 0207 530 2713 or e-mailed: bruce.buckmaster@cichs-tr.nthames.nhs.uk. We
wish them well in their new posts and look forward to working with them.
We hope that they will soon be able to work alongside CMHC’s own
Co-ordinator. One of
Angie’s first tasks is to develop and consult on the MH Trust’s User
Involvement Strategy. There
are currently some serious discussions about how this should best be done. Mental
Health & Social Care Trust Almost
since the very creation of the Camden & Islington Mental Health Trust
in April last year there have been discussions about recreating it in a
wider form as a Health & Social Care Trust.
The difficult discussions between Camden Council, Islington Council
and the MH Trust and the public consultation are at an end with an
(almost) fair wind for the creation of the Social Care Trust.
The final decision is in the hands of the Minister and an Order
needs to be laid before Parliament before 13 March for the SC Trust to
come into existence on 1st April.
There are still governance and representation questions to be
settled, but these can be dealt with once the SC Trust has an existence. What
is clear is that SC Trust or no SC Trust there are going to be a number of
new positions within the current structure which will impact on the mental
health services. Camden and Islington are each going to have a Borough
Director and a new post of Director of Social Care is also going to be
created. There are some
questions about these new layers of management and whether the NHS does
not already have enough managers and too few nurses, doctors and social
workers. But that seems to be
a never-ending battle. It has
been agreed that alongside the normal interview process for the selection
of candidates for these jobs there will be a wider group of people who are
asked to meet and consider the applicants. Although
these new posts are being created there will be no changes in the
management structure for the coming year.
So the current Locality Director/Assistant Locality Director Posts
will continue. However, the
list of things that the Trust has to achieve in the next year is probably
more than enough to occupy all these posts full time. Trust
Board meetings are open to the public and there is an opportunity to put
questions. These meetings are
often an opportunity to hear more about what is going on and what is being
planned and it seems a pity that so few members of the public actually
attend. Further
information is available from the Trust Board Headquarters on 0207 539
3472. The
MH Trust is currently looking for Service User Members for its User
Complaints & Incidents Committee.
Further information may be obtained from Emily Stokes on 0207 530
3384. Camden
Borough User Group (CBUG) CBUG
met for its monthly meeting on Wednesday, 27 February.
The venue this month was the Community Health Council office.
It is recognised that CBUG is going to take some time to settle
down to be a coherent organisation, but is continuing to meet and develop
and the people attending are enthusiastic about the group. As part of this month’s meeting, it began to consider a
Code of Conduct. Once this is
drawn up it will be offered to people for comment before it is finally
adopted by CBUG and other organisations which see it as valuable. CBUG
is still looking to recruit further members and if you are interested to
come to a meeting to consider the possibility of becoming a CBUG Member
then please contact CMHC. The
Group has agreed to continue to meet once a month for the present although
it may meet more frequently and begin its roadshows once the CMHC/CBUG
Co-coordinator is in post. The
meeting on Wednesday, 17 April will be an Open Meeting to introduce the
Co-ordinator and talk about the progress that CBUG is making. User
Advisory Group The
User Advisory is still keen to widen its membership and anyone who is
interested in joining should contact Angela Hall on 0207 530 2744.
The Group works with the MH Trust and has been in existence for a
number of years during which it has done some very important work and from
which user members of interview panels are regularly chosen.
UAG Members are rewarded for their attendance at meetings and the
work that they undertake. Mental
Health Liaison Group Camden
Council’s Mental Health Liaison Group will hold its next meeting on
Thursday, 21st March from 6.00 – 8.00 pm in The Sir William
Wells Atrium at The Royal Free Hospital.
This is a particularly significant venue when the principal topic
for discussion is ‘What Keeps People Out of Hospital’.
It will also be an opportunity to revisit the ‘Camden Crisis
House’ and hear what is happening to this much needed and much wanted
facility. The
MHLG is a long-standing group providing the opportunity to raise mental
health issues with Councillors and Council officers.
It is Chaired by Cllr John Rolfe.
In addition to its main topic, there are always opportunities to
raise other issues. Spring
Social CMHC
is planning to hold a Spring Social on Wednesday, 27 Macrh.
Further information will be available within the next ten days.
If any Members have any particular ideas on the form that they
would like it to take then they should contact CMHC – 020 7419 4196. Annual
General Meeting
The
confusion and concern that the new Freedom Pass application forms have
produced meant that we rescheduled the advertised
meeting about 'NSF’s Social Firms Project' in February.
We
invited Josephine Allman the Manager of the Accessible Transport Service
who process the forms and issue the Freedom Passes to talk about the new
rules. Predictably,
this produced the highest attendance we have ever had at any meeting.
A great deal of anxiety was clearly present at the meeting, and it
proved very useful in clarifying the issues.
Most people will have returned their forms by now. However
the following are the main points.
Service Users should not assume that they do not qualify just
because they do not seem to fit the categories neatly. 1.
You may qualify under the automatic criteria; 2.
If not 1. then you may qualify on the Mental Health Form; 3.
If not 2. then ask your Doctor/Psychiatrist to fill in the Medical
Form. If
you do no have a doctor then an examination can be arranged for you.
Most
users should manage to qualify in one of these categories. CMHC
will be following the progress of Freedom Pass applications to see what
effect the new criteria actually have and we would like to hear from
anyone who finds that they are no longer eligible for the Pass. The
meeting on Tuesday, 5th March, will be the replaced February
presentation by Julie Coombes who is working on the National Schizophrenia
Fellowship’s ‘Social Firms Project’.
This is an interesting and exciting development and may be one way
of service users actually getting work experience.
Bruce Buckmaster, the MH Trust’s new User Employment Officer will
be attending this meeting and it will provide an opportunity for people to
be introduced to him. We
will probably ask him to come to a meeting later in the year to talk about
the work that he is doing.
The
meeting on January 29th at Jules Thorn Day Hospital was well
attended. Michael Patchett talked about the work of the Assertive
Outreach Service, and it became clear very quickly that the close and
long-term support that they offer was very attractive to many of the
people present. For
some users AO is almost the 'dream team'.
Unfortunately, the present strict referral requirements mean that
hardly anybody at the meeting would have qualified.
The Department of Health is currently running a research project to
compare Assertive Outreach with more conventional CMHT services.
This will end shortly and the criteria will be eased, although not
completely. We
may invite the team back at a future date to tell us what developments
there have been and whether the enlarged team that is said to be justified
is actually going to come into being. The
February meeting on Tuesday, 26 February left a feeling that something was
wrong because of the very low attendance.
Fran Mason and Cllr Heather Thompson came to talk about Camden’s
Tenancy Support Services and the current Scrutiny of them.
The immediate impression was that the service and its off-shoot
CHUMS (Complimentary Housing Management Service) just do not seem to be
well enough known. The
March meeting will take place on Tuesday, 26 March but a speaker and topic
have yet to be arranged. Some
of the suggestions for future topics have been ‘Personality Disorders’
and ‘Medication’ – we are expecting to have a pharmacist at our May
meeting to talk about medication. Open Support Group The
group on February 11th was not well attended, and it must be
said that if attendance does not improve the future of the OSG may be in
doubt. This was the Group
that people requested CMHC to restart and we worked quite heard to
persuade the services to provide the money for something which is unusual
if not unique. Unfortunately
the take up has been quite disappointing.
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