Monthly Newsletter of Camden Mental Health Consortium |
|
ISSUE 59 |
JULY 2002 |
CMHC has been at the centre of the local campaign to involve service users in improving mental health services. We have always recognised that there are three keys to getting people involved: training, support and reward. The foundation and financing of the Camden Borough User Group (CBUG) as the active involvement arm of CMHC has enabled us to address the training and support needs. Sadly, we are not in a position to deal with reward. We have the money to reward people, but again and again we are faced with complex rules from government departments which might disadvantage anyone who takes it. This is not a problem to which there can be easy local solutions. It is a political issue which needs to be solved at that level and requires the ‘joined up thinking’ that we hear so much about and see so little of. If you want people to be involved then it must be worthwhile for them, and they must be able to receive payments without prejudicing their benefits.
Whenever a whole group of diverse people with different interests think that something is a bad idea, it probably is. The driving force for a new Mental Health Act has always been that group of people who have ‘Dangerously Severe Personality Disorders (DSPD)’. It is a very small group of people and a group which psychiatry has often honestly said that it has nothing to offer. Yet it is a group about which the public becomes very concerned and about which politicians say ‘something must be done’. That something would be the new Mental Health Bill in which the definition of ‘mental disorder’ is sufficiently blurred to allow DSPD to come within it. The Bill makes provision too for Community Treatment Orders, an idea which carries with it the implications of the Psychiatric Police Force. The Bill is a bad Bill and we should all resist it in very way that we can. BETTER IMAGES The new Channel 4 ‘Mind Out’ commercials showing the positive aspects of mental illness are to be welcomed. For the first time, those who undergo mental ill health are being portrayed as valuable members of society the loss of whom impacts on everyone. For a long time, service users have complained about the negative images that are given out by the media. For once, mental illness is being portrayed in real terms as something that strikes one in four people and is sometimes permanently disabling but more often is only temporary, and in either case should not diminish people as citizens. This is what Camden Mental Health Consortium is all about, and we welcome this campaign and hope to see it become more widespread.
LEAVING We are sorry to be losing our CMHC/CBUG Co-ordinator, John Lavery. John joined us on a one-year contract at the beginning of April. He is leaving to take up a permanent job in Islington. During his period with us John has been working to strengthen and develop the Camden Borough User Group and this work will continue. NOMINATIONS At the close of business on Tuesday, 16 July, the following nominations in the proper form had been received: Honorary Officers: Chair: Scott Stevens Nominated: Andie Triantafillou Seconded: Robert Watson Vice-Chair Angela Raja-Chowdhury Nominated: C. R. Arulambalam Seconded: Patrick Dalton Secretary: C. R. ‘Arul’ Arulambalam Nominated: Linda Polan Seconded: Ame Dunn-Lewin Treasurer: Patrick Dalton Nominated: Maureen Griffiths Seconded: Robert Watson In accordance with Section 9(f) of the CMHC Constitution, where the position is uncontested the nominee is elected to serve for the year. Management Committee Mrs Ame Dunn-Lewin Nominated: Patrick Dalton Seconded: Malti Zaveri Hugh Sturrock Nominated: Sabita Dewdney Seconded: Sarah Panton Mrs Malti Zaveri Nominated: Ame Dunn-Lewin Seconded: Patrick Dalton In accordance with Section 9(f) of the CMHC Constitution, where there are fewer candidates than there are vacancies, the nominated candidates are elected to serve for the year. The minimum numbers to comprise the Management Committee (who are the Trustees) are four Honorary Officers and four ordinary Members. Nominations may be taken from the floor at the Annual General Meeting. There are a total of five vacancies and therefore it will be possible for five people to be elected from the floor. All the arrangements are in place for the Annual General Meeting, which will be held from 6.00 – 8.30 pm on Tuesday, 30 July in The Sir William Wells Atrium at The Royal Free Hospital. We are expecting the Mayor of Camden and Glenda Jackson MP to attend and as usual we will have prizes for CMHC Members to win. The meeting will be followed by a buffet and refreshments. CMHC HELPLINE The beginning of June saw the launch of the CMHC Helpline. Each Wednesday since then, Linda Polan has been available from 11.00 – 3.00 pm on 020 7419 4197 to provide callers with help and information on mental health issues. The take up of this new service has been quite poor and we are already considering whether we should continue to run it. Originally, we were going to continue it until Christmas, but we may decide to review it before then if there are still very few callers. USER ADVISORY GROUP (UAG) The district Mental Health Service User Advisory Group looked at the availability of training for service users and the vexed question of payments. At its next meeting in August, it will consider the draft Mental Health Bill CBUG OPEN MEETING CBUG will hold an Open Meeting at Hampstead Town Hall on the afternoon of Wednesday, 21 August. The principal topic for discussion will be ‘In-Patient Acute Care’; and it will look at Risk Assessments. The meeting will also see the public release of the User Focussed Monitoring Reports on St Luke’s Hospital and The Huntley Centre.
As usual the last month has been very busy. Angela Hall and I have been working on the User Involvement Audit. We had already written a questionnaire for Managers of Service Provider Units. This month I wrote a draft questionnaire for users and an explanatory flyer to go with it. We took these to the Service User Involvement Strategy Group, and a confidentiality statement has now been added to the drafts. The purpose of the audit is to establish a clear picture of the present user involvement – who is involved and what are they doing. I had the opportunity to meet with Ian McIntyre who is Head of Planning for the Central & North-West London Mental Health Trust. Ian also takes the lead on user involvement for their trust. They cover five London Boroughs and have a User Involvement Support Worker working in each Borough. Each of these workers is funded by the trust but the post is hosted by a Voluntary Sector user-focussed organisation. The organisation hosting the User Involvement Worker is responsible for payment of rewards, and the users are responsible for informing the Department of Work & Pensions about payments that they receive. It was most interesting to see how another Trust involves its users, and I have passed on the information about rewards to Bruce Buckmaster. Camden Borough User Group (CBUG) continues to develop, and the format of one ‘main’ meeting and one working group per month has now been firmly established. From Wednesday, 21st August, all ‘main’ CBUG meeting will become ‘open’ giving more opportunities for people to become involved. Recruitment remains our main focus and I am pleased that we have had an interest from two users who are coming to the next CBUG meeting. An audit of the Advocacy Service at The Royal Free Hospital is currently in the planning stage, and considerable demands for user involvement are expected. As part of the recruitment campaign, I have continued my visits to local mental health services including the Bridge Project. There is also a strong commitment from the CBUG membership to visit services and to present CBUG as an organisation that other service users may want to join. I will be leaving my job as Co-ordinator of CMHC/CBUG in the middle of August, to take up a senior position at Islington Volunteer Centre at the beginning of September. I would like to take this opportunity to thank CBUG & CMHC members, and all my colleagues in the statutory and independent sectors for their support and hard work during my time in this post.
Angela Hall, the Islington Service User Co-ordinator within the Care Trust writes her monthly column. She can be contacted by post at 60 Bath Street, London, EC1V 9DP; by telephone on 020 7530 or by e-mail angela.hall@cichs-tr.nthames.nhs.uk The Waterlow Unit Summer Fete was held on Saturday, 13th July 2002, and the event was very well attended. The live music was excellent and many joined in for a song and dance. The event raised £1400 for in-patients at the Unit. The event’s success was due to the hard work and efforts of staff and in-patients from the Unit, and special thanks must be extended to Jo Lawrence who was responsible for co-ordinating the day, and naturally to all those of you who attended and contributed so generously. Andie Triantafillou, winner of the Kate Smyth ‘Making a Difference’ Award 2002 and I were invited along to the Trust board meeting for a presentation and ‘thank you’ from the Care Trust. We both received a beautiful bouquet. Andie was given £500 from the Trust towards the Jules Thorne Patients’ Council, in recognition of all the hard work they do. For nominating Andie, the Trust presented me with a £500 gift for the Mental Health User Advisory Group in recognition of its hard work and input. It was a wonderful and overwhelming gesture, and I would like to extend a big ‘thank you’ to the Care Trust for making us feel so special. I recently attended a meeting of the Islington Voluntary Sector Health Network and Shelly Chaudhury invited me to give a talk on user involvement in local mental health services. Shelly informed me that the Islington Voluntary Sector Health Network will be nominating members onto the Islington Health Partnership Board (IHPB). Shelly has asked if there are any Islington mental health service users out there who may be interested in IHPB membership. The deadline for feedback from the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust’s Service User Involvement Strategy Discussion Document has been reached. Feedback was received in a number of ways and has been collected by the Service User Involvement Strategy Steering Group. A huge amount of comments were forthcoming (48 typed pages in all!) coming from various areas in mental health, and thanks is extended for all those who fedback their valuable points to shape this important document. All comments collected will be added to the Service User Involvement Document which will be in draft form by September, ready for a three month consultation period. The final Service User Involvement Strategy should be available from January 2003.
Stuart McMullen, Assistant Locality Director in North Camden, writes about developments on the Camden side of the Care Trust. In Camden there are three main sites which provide in-patient psychiatric care. They are The Royal Free Hospital in North Camden; The Huntley Centre at St Pancras Hospital and St Luke’s Hospital in Muswell Hill, both covering South Camden. For those who live in Camden and need to be admitted to hospital these sites are used. This year the main focus for each of these sites is to look at the quality of care in each of the wards. The proposed development is to improve the ‘Therapeutic Culture’ on the wards. This is a term used to describe how effective the treatment is in hospitals. The concern is that the nature of the wards themselves, the way that staff work, including doctors, nurses and occupational therapists does not create the best culture for patients’ mental health to improve. It is the aim of the new Mental Health and Social Care Trust to improve this culture. The current proposals in North Camden are to review the staffing in the in-patient wards. The Department of Health published a report which showed that in order to improve the therapeutic culture of a psychiatric ward you have to increase and improve the quantity and the quality of the interaction between the ward staff and the patient. Part of this proposal is therefore to increase the staffing on the wards and to increase the amount of time that staff are able to spend in direct contact with patients. Increased staff alone does not in itself improve patient care and the central aim of the proposals is to improve the organisation of staffing to maximise the time spent directly with patients. The belief is that if patients are able to spend more time with their primary nurse, their Occupational Therapist or Technical Instructor the faster their mental health will improve. It is hoped that by improving the quality of in-patient care this will also help to prevent re-admission when people leave hospital. The proposals are currently being consulted on and it is hoped that full plans for this will be agreed in the coming months. Elsewhere in the Trust there are similar initiatives. The Trust hopes to create equity across the three main hospital sites so that residents of Camden can expect the same quality of care regardless of where they are admitted. Staff are currently agreeing how to improve the quality of the information given to patients as they are admitted to hospital. It is hoped to be clear to all patients about what they can expect from their care. This includes information about what they can expect while they are an in-patient, their rights and the ways in which they will be able to have contact with ward staff, including doctors. Information on ward rounds is currently being developed. In South Camden for example there is a Clinical Governance Project on Sutherland Ward at St Luke’s Hospital. This project again aims to improve the quality and quantity of staff contact with patients. One of the most exciting projects has also come from South Camden. Sue Salas, Assistant Locality Director, and Dr Sushrat Jahdev from The Huntley Centre have recently received an award for a project to improve the in-patient experience for Muslim in-patients. The project is designed to increase staff awareness of Muslim culture and to help make the in-patient wards more culturally sensitive. With the help of the Transcultural Nursing & Healthcare Award and with other money from the Trust, the project has recently employed a worker called Asim Hanif who will start at the beginning of August to work with staff. The plan is to employ two project workers to work one day a week for a year. The other area which will help to improve the quality of care for patients is of course to improve the environment of the hospital sites. Some of the wards need more environmental improvements than others dependant on the age of the wards the physical layout. In North Camden, work is planned to change the lighting on the wards, to decorate the bedrooms and communal areas and to complete the work on the balcony area. It is also planned to increase the amount of domestic support available on the wards. By April 2003 each ward should have its own Housekeeper. Other in-patient news, following the recent appointment of Tracey Griffiths in the role of Clinical Service Manager – or ‘Modern Matron’ at The Royal Free, I can announce that Andrew Morgan has just been appointed into the same role at The Huntley Centre. It is recognised that all of these schemes and developments are happening independently at the different sites. There seems to be good practice in each of the wards which other parts of the Trust need to benefit from. For this reason the Trust has set up an Acute Care Forum which has invited staff from throughout Camden and Islington to come together to share ideas and discuss how best to improve the quality of care. From next month, Jackie Drury. Assistant Locality Director in South Islington will be writing about developments on the Islington side of the Care Trust.
|