Detention under the provisions of the Mental Health Act is a contentious matter. It is after all one of the very few times when someone may have their freedom taken away without the intervention of a Court and where there is no immediate appeal against such detention. The levels of formal admission in Islington and Camden – more than 90% and 70% respectively – give cause for enormous concern. These figures are almost four and three times higher than those reported by The South London and Maudsley Trust where the population is not greatly different from that locally. A number of inferences might be drawn from these figures, but they need to be tested and explained and if there is significant disproportionality then the reasons for this need investigation. These numbers are interesting both in themselves and in relation to the number of beds needed within the District. They may have even more significance this week if the Queen’s Speech to Parliament tells us that the Government has it in mind to introduce a new Mental Health Bill. THE MENTAL HEALTH LIAISON GROUP Last month, The Bugle asked the question ‘What Has Happenned to the Mental Health Liaison Group?’ This piece led to quite a detailed discussion of the Group’s role and future and Jill Clarkson, who organises it and Camden Council’s other Liaison Groups would be interested to hear the views of service users. She can be contacted on 020 7974 1459 or by e-mail: jill.clarkson@camden.gov.uk The next meeting of the MHLG will be held from 6.00 – 8.00 pm on Thursday, 11th December at the Highgate Centre, 19-37 Highhgate Road, NW5 when the main topic on the agenda will be ‘What Is Your Experience of GPs?’
SOME PROPOSED DATES FOR THE BEST VALUE REVIEW CMHC will be employing CBUG as its means of inputting the service-user viewpoint into Camden’s Best Value Review of Mental Health Day Provision. CBUG Members will be roadshowing the consultation but there will be an Open Meeting to start the process and this is provisionally scheduled from 1.30 – 3.00 pm at ‘The Hoo’, 17 Lyndhurst Gardens, NW3 on Thursday, 8th January. Confirmation of this date will be given as soon as possible. CARE TRUST BOARD MEETINGS The Care Trust Board will be holding a Seminar on Eating Disorders in The Groves Lounge, South Wing, St Pancras Hospital on Thursday, 27th November from 12 noon. There are limited places for the public and anyone wishing to attend should contact Kate Wilkins on 020 7445 8427. The final meeting of the Mental Health & Social Care Trust Board will be for this year will be held on Thursday, 18th December at 5.30 pm in the Conference Centre at St Pancras Hospital. Trust Board Meetings are open to the public and we would encourage as many people as possible to attend. Papers may be obtained from the Board Secretary, Kate Wilkins, on 020 7445 8427 or by e-mail kate.wilkins@candi.nhs.uk and Kate should also be approached if people wish to notify any questions. CMHC CHRISTMAS MEETING & PARTY All the arrangements are in place for the CMHC Christmas Special General Meeting and Party on Friday, 12th December in The Conference Centre, West Wing, St Pancras Hospital from 6.00 – 8.00 pm. The formal part of the meeting is intended to increase the number of Trustees of CMHC. There are currently three vacancies and nominations will be taken from the floor. The speaker for this meeting is Peter Horn, Chief Executive of the London Development Centre for Mental Health, who will talk about the past year’s work at the LDC and its increasing significance in London’s mental health network. There will also be an opportunity to discuss wider involvement with the LDC and its work. COMMISSION FOR PATIENT & PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT IN HEALTH (CPPIH) CPPIH says that it will have the local Patients’ Forums established by December and meeting in January. It is not quite clear yet how this new statutory body will interface with those that already exist, but CMHC will try and work with it to ensure that it is made fully aware of the views of service users and is in a position to have dialogue with them. NEWS FROM THE VOLUNTARY SECTOR Aidan Moloney is the Co-ordinator of Camden & Islington Providers’ Forum (CIPF). In future we will be including regular monthly contributions from Aidan telling people what is happening in the voluntary sector. Aidan can be contacted by post at Camden & Islington Providers’ Forum, Legard Works, Legard Road, London, N5 1DE; by ‘phone on 020 7226 2022, and by e-mail cipf.office@virgin.net CIPF will be actively involved in two initiatives that will have implications for the way services in both the statutory and voluntary sectors are delivered locally. We were recently invited to nominate three representatives on the Camden Local Implementation Team (LIT). The purpose of the LITs is to oversee the local implementation of the guidelines set out in the NHS National Service Framework for Mental Health. We already have two representatives on the Islington LIT, which was formed earlier this year. It is important for us to have this representation, as the LITs will be influential in determining what services are implemented locally in delivering mental health services. We look forward to working with the service-user representatives who have been nominated through CMHC onto the Camden LIT. Secondly, the voluntary sector, through CIPF, has been asked to nominate a representative to co-chair the Camden Day Care Review Working Group. This group will report to the overarching Best Value review of services in Camden. Although statutory led, the Best Value review will impact on service delivery for all providers and we are pleased to be closely involved in the consultation process, as we are in Islington also. Here, again, the input from the voluntary sector and service users will be crucial to ensuring that local services meet the needs of service users and are delivered with this objective in mind. Through our involvement in these processes, CIPF is keen to foster joint working between the sectors to provide the best possible local services.
The collaboration on Research between the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at The Royal Free Campus of University College London and Camden Mental Health Consortium began three years ago. The first project of this partnership has been research into the Stigma of Mental Illness from the viewpoint of the service user. Stigma is one of those subjects on which there is a great deal written (anthropological, sociological, philosophical and theological viewpoints). Much study has gone into the stigma associated with mental illness, but little or none of it has previously looked at the stigma of mental illness from the point of view the stigmatised – those with mental ill health. This research does that. The subject is of great significance but the method is also important. To assist in the work, two service users were recruited as Research Assistants and have worked with the Research Fellow, Sokratis Dinos for the last two years. This was the topic for the November North Camden User Forum where Sokratis came along to present the results of the research work that he has now completed and which is expected to be published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in January. The research found that there was a great deal of stigma associated with mental illness and in particular with schizophrenia. Interestingly, there seemed to be some positive aspects associated with the stigma too. Stigma obviously adds to the difficulties of mental ill-health and makes it worse. The December meeting on Tuesday, 2nd December, will be in Room 20 on Level 2 at The Royal Free Hospital (near psychiatry out-patients) and will have as its topic ‘Surviving Christmas’. This is one of the few meetings in the year where we do not have a speaker but rather ask people to come along and share their own experiences and tell others how they enjoy, celebrate or simply suffer the Christmas period. We held this meeting in December last year and it proved very successful and had people sharing their experiences. We hope that lots of people will come along and that something similar will happen this year. There will also be some seasonal refreshments so that people can enter the party spirit. NCUF will be meeting again throughout the New Year. The January meeting of the North Camden User Forum is the first CMHC meeting of 2004 and will bring along Werner Valentin from CASA with a talk on ‘Double Trouble – Mental Health and Drug & Alcohol Use’. This will be the first in a full programme of NCUF for 2004.
The October meeting of the South Camden User Forum was another ‘Ask the CEO’. This began in North Camden and gave rise to a great deal of trouble with misreporting in the local press. For this reason, a member of the Care Trust’s Communications Department accompanied the CEO, Erville Millar, to the meeting. It was unnecessary since this time there were no press. Everyone was able to relax and consider the questions. One of the most significant questions asked was about facilities for the physically disabled. Erville recognised that the Care Trust was not strong on these, although he thought that in The Huntley Centre and at The Royal Free there were access facilities. He admitted that there were no disabled facilities, access or otherwise, at St Luke’s Hospital and thought that it would be some time before they were there. He was more positive that the new Highgate Mental Health Centre which will replace the current Waterlow Unit and is due to open in the Spring of next year would meet the need. It is a state-of-the-art centre which complies with all the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and it would be there that physically disabled patients would go if the facilities they required were lacking elsewhere. He also looked forward to The Royal Free Tower Development which would again provide all the most modern facilities and comply with the requirements of the DDA. One of the other questions asked Erville about user involvement and, in particular, whether it was going to be necessary to reduce the expenditure on it in the light of the Care Trust’s reported financial difficulties. Erville explained that there would not be any significant cutbacks in what the Care Trust had committed itself to deliver. The Care Trust had always said that it would put service users at the centre of its operations and it intended to continue to do that. Even as we go to press we learn that the November SCUF will have to be abandoned as Sarah-Jane Mills is now unable to attend. This is much regretted since it is not often that we have an opportunity to look at these services. We would hope to reschedule this for 2004 and either together or separately look at the new initiatives within prisons. The Care Trust is now providing mental health services in both HMP Holloway and HMP Pentonville. This is a new and important development in an area where the level of mental ill-health is known to be high. There is no meeting in December so it is quite a long time before the next SCUF on Tuesday, 27th January, when Professor Roland Littlewood, an old friend from the Department of Anthropology at UCL, will come along to talk about ‘Psychopatholgy & Creativity’.
The Camden Borough User Group (CBUG) was created so that there would be a group of interested CMHC Members who could take on particular pieces of work. It has been very successful in this and has been developed from the project that it originated as into part of the general work of Camden Mental Health Consortium. It is the working arm of the organisation. Although it enjoyed a high-profile launch at the November 2001 Annual Service Users’ Conference, it took some time to transform from the idea into the reality of twelve people who wanted and were enabled to take an active part in CMHC projects. The last year has seen the group develop and establish itself in the mental health landscape. So much is this true, that there is almost more work than CBUG can handle and it is looking to recruit further members to bring it back to full strength. CBUG is a group where people spend a period of time and then probably move on. This is good for the group, which is renewed, and for the people who have additional experience to take with them. A similar structure is being developed in Islington as the Islington Borough User Group (IBUG). This was formally launched in the Spring of 2003 and meets monthly. It has been handicapped by not having office space or a member of staff and earlier in the year a proposal to rectify this and build a stronger link with CBUG was unable to obtain the necessary funding. We know, however, that IBUG is undertaking work in Islington and is heavily involved with their Best Value Review and Local Implementation Team for the National Service Framework. We expect to see that there will be further developments in IBUG during the coming year and CBUG will be working to strengthen the links between the two groups and perhaps become involved in some joint work. This year CBUG has been involved with two main pieces of work:
monitoring the Mind in Camden Advocacy Service on the in-patient wards at The Royal Free Hospital; monitoring the North Camden Crisis Response & Resolution Service. Both of these use the model developed by CORE (Centre for Outcomes Research and Effectiveness) at University College London which has been agreed as the standard procedure across the Care Trust and has also been used in the inpatient units at The Waterlow Unit, The Huntley Centre, St Luke’s Hospital and The Royal Free Hospital and the Islington Community Mental Health Teams. It is also intended to use it on the Camden Mental Health Teams and the Rehabilitation Services in the coming months. The work at the RFH takes the form of a questionnaire administered by a trained CBUG member and has so far been both efficient and successful. It is hoped that we can extend this to the other advocacy projects being run at The Huntley Centre and St Luke’s Hospital so that there will be more data and some comparison. This would make the eventual report a richer document and might provide some data on the strengths and weaknesses of the present advocacy provision. Up until now the Crisis Team work has been done by postal questionnaire. This has now been extended so that people who have used the Crisis Team can fill in the questionnaire with the assistance of a CBUG member. Both pieces of work are scheduled to finish in April 2004. Part of the CBUG year is the Annual Service Users’ Conference which has now become established and been running for 5 years. Last year the Conference took as its subject ‘Dealing With a Crisis’ As this edition of The Camden Bugle goes to press, this year’s Conference is just a few days away and will be centred on ‘Mental Health Advocacy’. CBUG will be undertaking another major piece of work during the coming year with its involvement as the Service User Reference Group for the Best Value Review of Day Provision in Camden. The Review will look at Adult Day Services, Day Provision for the elderly, and Adult Day Hospitals, although they will not necessarily all be being done simultaneously. The CBUG role will be to collect the views of the various groups of service users on what provision they feel is most suitable for their needs. They will be invited not only to look at what is currently available but to consider too what Day Services might look like and provide. CBUG will be organising meetings both large and small so that service users can have their say. Martin Elman is taking the lead for CBUG in this project and he will be striving hard to see that there is an opportunity for as many service users as possible to have their say. The workload on CBUG at present means that it has discontinued its monthly open meetings and meets instead as a Working Group twice a month to take forward and develop its work. Open Meetings will now be held on a quarterly basis and the next one is expected to be in April 2004. There will, however, be a Christmas Meeting on Wednesday, 17th December, at Hampstead Town Hall when the Members of IBUG have been invited to join with CBUG to review the year and to see how successful user engagement has been. They will also be encouraged to enjoy themselves and celebrate the work that has been done and achievements made during the year and look forward to 2004. No doubt the coming year will provide more work for both groups and they will become further engaged in trying to make the mental health services more responsive to the needs of those who use them.
Robert Jones, the Social Care & Inclusion Development Manager, provides a review of the month’s events within Camden & Islington Mental Health & Social Care Trust. Robert can be contacted at Care Trust Headquarters, 2nd floor, East Wing, St Pancras Hospital, London NW1 OPE, by telephone on 020 7445 8554 or by e-mail robert.jones@candi.nhs.uk The College of Occupational Therapists has developed a new post for a service user on their Ethics Committee and have contacted the Care Trust’s Service User Involvement Co-ordinator to request that you are made aware of this. They are seeking someone who can represent the views of service users who have used Occupational Therapy Services. The individual must be a current service user of OT or someone who has used OT services within the last 2 years. The committee meets four times a year. Nomination to the Committee must be supported by an Occupational Therapist. For further information, including a nomination form, job description and person specification please contact Joanna McEwan, Administrator for the Ethics Committee, on 020 7450 2318 or e-mail: joanna.mcewan@cot.co.uk User Focused Monitoring (UFM) The next stage of UFM is fast approaching, and the next areas to be monitored within the Care Trust will be Rehabilitation & Residential Services and Camden Community Mental Health Team clients. The Centre for Outcomes, Research and Effectiveness (CORE) will be running a training session for service users who would like to be involved in these particular projects. The course is due to run in February. A detailed flyer is available. Expressions of interest should be forwarded in writing, and the deadline for this is 7th January. There is a maximum of 12 places available on the course. If anyone is interested in becoming involved or would like to find out more, please contact Angela Hall on 020 7530 2744.
Camden Options Road Show
Final preparations are underway for the new Camden Options Road Show that is due to begin in the New Year. This new initiative has been set up by the Camden-based employment projects: Social Link, Jobs in Mind, Umbrella and the Service User Employment Programme in conjunction with the Occupational Therapy Department. The weekly events will initially tour four sites in the borough (see below) and provide an opportunity for local service users to explore vocational, training and education opportunities. The first event will be held at the Barclay Unit on Monday, 5th January. Watch out for the posters which should be appearing soon.
Best Value Review Event Islington Best Value Review of Day and Employment Services moved up a gear on 20th November when a ‘Challenging Social Exclusion Seminar’ was held at the Isledon Road Resource Centre. Presentations by Miles Rinaldi from South West and St George’s NHS Trust and Jill Pearson from British Telecom presented compelling arguments why and how organisations should be employing mental health service users. If you would like further information or a copy of presentations for this event, please email bruce.buckmaster@candi.nhs.uk User Advisory Group (UAG) The last meeting of the UAG for 2003 will take the form of a celebration and will be held in The Training Department at St Luke’s Hospital on Friday, 19th December. Middlesex University Conference The School of Health and Social Sciences at Middlesex University will be holding a Conference on ‘User Involvement in Health and Social Care Practice, Education and Research’ at The Holiday Inn, Regent’s Park on Wednesday, 21st January 2004. As far as we know there are no free places but there are discounted places for service users and further information on this may be obtained from Debbie Jeske on Tel 020 8411 5265, or email: d.jeske@mdx.ac.uk.
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