Monthly Newsletter of Camden Mental Health Consortium |
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ISSUE 88 |
December 2004 |
The Camden Borough User Group (CBUG) was established with the purpose of increasing the involvement of service users in developing, monitoring and evaluating local mental health services. One of the methods chosen to monitor services is the ‘Your Care & Treatment’ questionnaire developed by CORE at University College London into a system of User Focussed Monitoring (UFM). CBUG has been heavily involved in this as has our sister organisation the Islington Borough User Group (IBUG). When the contract for User Focussed Monitoring was advertised with a particular preference for joint bids, it seemed that such a combined bid from a well-known and respected local provider together with CBUG and IBUG must fit the bill. Even so, we were surprised that none of the other bidders approached the established user groups. This would at least have seemed to make sense in the light of the specification. The interview panel, which included the Islington and Camden Commissioners and the Director of CORE, did not consider the bid with CBUG and IBUG as partners to be strong enough to win the contract. It was a competitive process and that was always a possibility. It did however come as a shock when the successful bidder was an organisation based in Islington which works across Islington and Hackney and does not see itself as working essentially or exclusively in mental health. It has no previous experience of working in User Focussed Monitoring in Camden and Islington or of the CORE UFM method CBUG and IBUG have been rejected and yet they are the user groups that have the experience. What are they now supposed to do? Is it that the Commissioners do not think that they are value for money and the next move will be to withdraw their funding?
A FITTING TRIBUTE Danny Carmody was a unique and highly talented artist and user of the mental-health services locally. Last year, Danny was generous enough to give us two of his local paintings to use on our Christmas Cards – Kentish Town Baths and Kings Cross. Sadly, Danny died this year. As a tribute to him, we have decided to use his images once again this year. We miss him but his work lives on.
THANKS CMHC would like to thank the Jill Franklin Trust for its generous donation of £500 towards our general expenses. The Jill Franklin Trust is another of those local charities which has previously made donations to support the work of CMHC. We are extremely grateful for their donation and particularly since they are able to see the results of the work that we do within the local community.
CMHC SPECIAL GENERAL MEETING The Christmas Meeting held at St Pancras Conference Centre on Friday, 10th December 2004, was in some ways an historic occasion which presided over the agreement to dissolve CMHC in its current form and re-establish it as a Company Limited by Guarantee. This is a constitutional change which has been recommended by our auditors and legal advisers and is in keeping with good practice and had been previously approved at two Annual General Meetings in 2001 and 2002. At last it was formalised in a proposal by Martin Elman seconded by Caren Watson and passed without dissent. The intention is that the new company be set up and be brought into being at the beginning of the new financial year – 1st April 2005. The current Trustees will become the first Directors of the new Company. It was also agreed that if the legal advice is affirmative that in future CMHC Trustees may be paid for work that they do on behalf of the organisation. This allows Trustees to be involved with CBUG and receive the same expenses payments as other CBUG members. CMHC needed another two trustees to make up its complement of twelve – four Honorary Officers and eight Committee Members – and this time it was lucky to find two more members to take on that role:
RICHARD SCOTT and JOSEPH FALCONE CMHC is delighted to welcome them as Trustees. It is a good sign for the organisation that it is now able to recruit new Trustees who have not previously been involved in this way. They too will become Directors of the new Company. It is traditional at a Christmas meeting to review the year. Professor David Taylor, Chair of the Camden & Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust, spoke a little about the financial problems that the Trust had but seems to be resolving and of the brand new development of The Highgate Mental Health Centre of which the Trust is duly proud. Maggie Wakelin-Saint is Chair of The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and she spoke a little about the work that they do and the changes that have taken place in attitudes. At the Christmas 2003 Meeting, Peter Horn came to talk about the London Development Centre’s year and this year he came back to say what they had done and what they had not managed and to be scored on their achievements. The influence of the Development Centre in a number of areas grows and grows and it seems likely to grow further in the coming year. Colin Plant is Camden’s Director of Mental Health Services and he has had many worries over the past year. He recognised the input of service users and CMHC/CBUG to the development of mental health services in Camden and to the overall improvement. He looked forward to the new Royal Free Tower development and what that would bring.
POST- CHRISTMAS PARTY All-too-often the period after Christmas is miserable for people. There is the anti-climax and the dark and cold nights. In order to bring a bit of joy into this otherwise miserable time, CMHC is arranging a Party & Disco on Friday, 14th January, at The London Irish Centre from 8.00pm until late with our own DJ Hugh in charge of things. There will be free food and soft drinks and spot prizes to be won.
DATES FOR 2005 In order that people will have some clear picture of what CMHC events there will be in 2005, some dates are already fixed:
CMHC ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING – Tuesday, 18th October ANNUAL SERVICE USERS’ CONFERENCE – Wednesday, 23rd November CMHC CHRISTMAS MEETING & PARTY – Friday, 16th December
The dates and speakers for the North and South Camden User Forums are usually to be found on the backs of the flyers for those meetings. More information will be found on the Events & Diary page of The Camden Bugle.
The traditional subject for the North Camden User Forum has become ‘Surviving Christmas’ and once again this year the group met to air its views on this topic. The numbers were down but the quality of the discussion was high, and this time it had a slightly different flavour being led by Penny Abraham who has been working on the Stress Busting Sessions in South Camden. Most people do seem to find this time of year stressful but although they hate the increasingly long run up to it, they quite enjoy the festivities over the Christmas period. Two people in the group actually still looked upon it as marking a highly significant Christian event – the birth of Christ – and will take part in the celebrations of the Church around this time of the year. Most of the rest found it an over-commercialised secular celebration for eating, drinking and spending money. Everyone there will have come away having thought a bit more about what they would do and how they could best enjoy what for some is a very happy time; for others quite a sad time and for a large number a very lonely time. The North Camden User Forum has been meeting for more than five years now and it will continue in 2005. The first meeting of the New Year will be from 5.00 – 6.30 pm on Tuesday, 4th January, in Room 20 in the Psychotherapy Corridor on Level 2 of The Royal Free Hospital (near Psychiatry Out-Patients). Colin Plant, Director of Mental Health Services for Camden, and Tarceyanne Munn, Project Officer for the new build, will be coming along to talk about the new Mental Health development in the Nurses’ Tower on The Royal Free Hospital site, which is due to open in the Summer of 2005 and replace the current wards on Level 2. The discussion will centre around the things that service users would like to see in this new unit and it is hoped that there will be some photographs of the work to the present so that people can see what it will be like. The February meeting will be a rather special one since it will see the beginning of a new collaboration with researchers in the Department of Mental Health Sciences at The Royal Free Campus of University College London in the Service User Research Forum (SURF). It is hoped that this will be a District-wide group covering Camden and Islington which will comprise of researchers and service users looking at possible topics for research from service users and considering research possibilities put forward by the academics. This collaboration has been going on informally from the time that the Head of the Department of Mental Health Sciences, Professor Michael King, came to talk about research some years ago. It is now being formalised into a group that will meet regularly and will be recognised by the Care Trust.
It is clear that the subject of the meetings is very important. The last meeting of the South Camden User Forum for 2004 had as its topics ‘Users’ Views of ECT’. The number of people who came to listen to Dr Diana Rose talk about her research work on this topic showed just how significant a topic it is for service users. It also gave us some information about a possible reason for the poor attendances at SCUF this year. Diana is an unusual person. She is a long-time user of the mental health services locally and a distinguished researcher often looking at aspects of mental-health from the consumer’s viewpoint. She worked at The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health where she developed their User Focussed Monitoring programme and is now the Co-ordinator of the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) at The Institute of Psychiatry in South London. Diana presented her work and there was a very good discussion about the continuing use of a treatment which is described by some as ‘barbaric’ and by others as ‘life saving’. There is still much to be said and done about ECT and the Forum presented two questions for the Care Trust:
1. how often has ECT been used in the last twelve months; 2. which consultants prescribe it.
and we hope to be able to print the answers to these in due course. Much discussion has gone into the future of the South Camden User Forum particularly because the poor attendances over the past year led to the cancellation of the meetings in July and August and the development of the Stress Busting sessions in their place. It has been decided that in 2005 we will have a different approach. We will hold some of the traditional meetings but from February the SCUF will also be travelling to various venues representing the places where people with mental-health difficulties in South Camden are to be found, hostels, day centres … The first meeting of 2005 will be held from 5.00 – 6.30 pm on Tuesday, 25th January in The Conference Centre at St Pancras Hospital when an old friend of SCUF, Dr Sushrut Jadhav will be coming to talk about ‘Cultural Sensitivity is for Everyone’. Sushrut works as a consultant on The Mornington Unit at St Pancras Hospital and he will be coming along with Vicy Manzini, who is the Cross-Cultural Nurse working on that unit, to talk about the unique work that they have been doing on the relationship between culture and mental ill-health.
Ros Lettman, the acting Service User Involvement Co-ordinator, provides a review of the month’s events within Camden & Islington Mental Health & Social Care Trust. Ros can be contacted at Care Trust Headquarters, 2nd floor, East Wing, St Pancras Hospital, London NW1 OPE, by telephone on 020 7530 3340 or by e-mail ros.lettman@candi.nhs.uk
More Members for the Service User Implementation Group The Service User Implementation group (IG) is a membership only group which meets monthly. It consists of 10 Camden and 10 Islington service users. The group is a working group and looks at areas of policy and practice within the Care Trust. We are at present implementing areas of the Service User Involvement Strategy, we are organising a group of service users to go into Care Trust sites to get feedback from service users and find out what their needs are. If you would like to join the IG and get involved in the work then contact Ros Lettman on 0207-530-3340 Interviews for the implementation group will be held early in 2005.
Learning for Better Mental Health It is generally agreed that education is good for your health. People who do well in initial education tend to get better jobs, which in turn leads to a better quality of life. Better quality of life means an improved chance of good physical and mental health. The flip-side of this, of course, is that poor experience of initial education and leaving school with low level or no qualifications may have a negative impact on future health and wellbeing. The recently published social exclusion unit report on mental health and social exclusion states that one-third of people experiencing mental health difficulties have no qualifications with another third having qualifications equivalent to GCSE. A study undertaken by the Basic Skills Agency also reported that women with low-level literacy skills are fives times more likely to experience depression than women with good literacy skills. At the same time, men with poor literacy skills are three times more likely to experience depression than men with good literacy skills. Leaving school with skills and qualifications gives you access to the things in life that keep you well, such as decent pay, more secure employment, better housing and greater choice and opportunities. (the full article in ‘Open Mind’ November/December edition) Events Rethink (which is a national mental health voluntary organisation) are offering a self management support group to people living with the effects of long term mental distress, particularly those who have been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia. What is a self-management group? The group aims to be a safe, supportive space in which people living with long term mental distress may be with people with similar experiences and concerns, in order to share with, learn from and be inspired by each other. The group will encourage its members to leave behind stigma and develop a belief in themselves and their abilities. The group is free and runs weekly on a Thursday afternoon. The venue is near Warren Street. There are still three vacancies in this group. For more information or to book a space in the group call David Martin on 0207-713-8986
CAMDEN COUNCIL’s MENTAL HEALTH LIAISON GROUP
The Liaison Group met at Jules Thorn Day Unit on the evening of Thursday, 9th December, to consider as its primary topic ‘Complaints’. Complaints are not only an area where people are vexed but it is a vexed area, particularly in terms of the Care Trust where there is no unified system of complaints across health and social care.
The PALS system has clearly had an impact both on the number of complaints and the ability to resolve issues quickly to the satisfaction of the service user or carer. There are clear difficulties with PALS being a part of the Care Trust and there might be some benefit in establishing their independence, but this seems unlikely to happen for the time being.
For those who do want to complain there is the Independent Complaints and Advocacy Service (ICAS) who will advise and assist complainants to put their complaint in the proper form and direct it to the correct place. This is an independent service but it seems to suffer capacity problems. It was interesting to hear representatives of both the Care Trust and Camden Council say that complaints are a healthy measure of the success of any organisation and that they are to be welcomed. It was not so clear that people who complain could feel entirely satisfied that they would be treated as if they were assisting the organisation by doing so. This is part of the difficulty, for people to feel that they can complain safely.
This is the fifth Camden Service Users’ Conference. It always tries to pick a theme which has a particular relevance to Camden – in 2002, it was Crisis Services with particular reference to Crisis Houses and last year it looked at Mental Health Advocacy. It was appropriate that the theme taken this year was taken from another theme which has run through the year – the Best Value Review of Camden’s Mental Health Day Provision. The Conference set itself up to look at the task of implementing the Best Value Review. It was a significant date – 24th November – for it was on that night that the Report was to go to the Council’s Executive. The significance of the process was further emphasised by the number of service users who were present throughout the afternoon and the many questions that were asked. Peter Horn, Chief Executive of the London Development Centre for Mental Health, chaired the afternoon and he was an important choice because he also Chairs Camden’s Best Value Review Service Review Team (SRT) and had undertaken the same task for the Islington Best Value Review. Peter set the Review in its local and national context and particularly with relevance to the recent Social Exclusion Report. The Review had been conducted in three separate parts – Day Centres, Day Hospitals and Community Mental Health Teams – and this was how it was presented to the Conference. Colin Plant, Camden’s Director of Mental Health Services, talked about the Day Hospital Review and how it had been conducted. In future he saw Day Hospital as Recovery Centres, one in the North and one in the South of the Borough. He also saw the need for a dedicated Personality Disorder Day Hospital which would fit in with Government proposals and the current developments within Camden. George Platts, one of Camden’s two Assistant Directors of Mental Health Services. Talked about the Community Mental Health Teams and the variety of work they undertook and how there was a need in particular to strengthen the contacts with the Primary Care Services. The Day Centre Review and the conclusions from all three were woven together by the consultant who has been responsible for the process, Joan Greaves. She talked about the overall theme of future services – Recovery – and showed how Person Centred Planning, Support Time and Recovery Workers would be used to achieve this. The final part of the process, the political will and commitment to these new values was demonstrated by the presence of Camden’s Executive Member for Health & Social Services, Cllr Geethika Jayatilaka, who spoke with passion about a new ethos which would concentrate more on the fact that mental ill-health was a phase from which people recover and that they should not be fully included in society with all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. High on this list is the right to work. She saw a vision of the future of mental-health services as being one where people were considered as individuals and had choice and that the role of the services would be to support this.
Aidan Moloney is the Co-ordinator of Camden & Islington Providers’ Forum (CIPF). We include 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 Recently CIPF was invited to a meeting with Sue Gallagher, who has been commissioned to undertake a review of the current mental health commissioning arrangement in Camden. This meeting was very positive and it seems that Camden PCT and social services department are determined to engage with stakeholders to improve their commissioning of mental health services. I look forward to receiving Sue’s findings, which are due for publication early in the New Year. Following my involvement with the Capital Volunteering steering group in Islington, which started meeting a couple of months ago, I am pleased to see that Camden has set the date for its group’s initial meeting. This meeting will be held on 17th December. Capital Volunteering tackles issues of mental health and social exclusion by increasing the number and range of supported volunteering opportunities in London. The project helps existing organisations to enable people with serious mental health issues to volunteer in a wide range of settings, thereby increasing their confidence, skills, social networks and employability. The project also supports existing organisations to organise volunteers to act as social sponsors or buddies to people with serious mental health issues. CIPF is very pleased to be involved in this very promising project.
I am grateful for the support I have received from colleagues through CMHC throughout 2004 and I look forward to working with you and making new contacts in 2005. I would like to take this opportunity to wish all Camden Bugle readers a happy and peaceful holiday period and wish you all well for the New Year.
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