Funding Secured for New Ground-Breaking Community Mental Health Transformation
Coventry and Warwickshire Health and Care Partnership is pleased to announce its success in securing funding of £11.9 million over three years from NHS England / NHS Improvement.
This is a once in a generation opportunity to boldly transform our community mental health services. Our commitment is to provide an enhanced service which is easily accessible, providing integrated and seamless care and support for people experiencing mental distress.
The principles and detail of the transformed service have been co-designed by a multi-sector alliance of partners including health, Local Authorities, voluntary and community sector organisations (VCSE) and people with lived experience of mental health challenges.
Claire Handy is a critical part of the transformation team, as a person with lived experience of mental health difficulties. Claire said: “I am delighted to be working on the development of this once in a lifetime opportunity to improve mental health services. I am passionate that we must place people at the heart of everything we do and work with all organisations available, not only the NHS or social care.”
The new transformed service will provide people with severe and continuing mental illness with easier and faster access to services delivered at neighbourhood level by a range of partners across health, social care and VCSE - equal partners working to shared principles, to best meet our local population’s needs. The service will be trauma informed throughout, shifting the focus from ‘what’s wrong with me’ towards ‘what’s happened to me’.
Together a new community-based service will be established that will include access to talking therapies, improved physical health care, employment support, personalised care tackling the root cause of the problem, medicines management and support for self-harm and co-existing substance use.
The areas of work specifically highlighted are to support services for adults with severe and continuing mental illness including:
- People with a diagnosis of Personality Disorder
- Eating Disorders
- Community Rehabilitation
Dr Richard Onyon, Consultant Psychiatrist and Associate Medical Director at Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust, said: “Over the next three years, we aim to develop a sustainable community mental health care system that will provide individuals with seamless care across physical and mental health services.
“Our plans for this new system-wide provision of support for people’s mental health is an ambitious but exciting one. The work will include the establishment of invaluable, new roles including people who have lived experience of mental health difficulties. We have already begun to establish stronger links with GPs, with new Mental Health Workers starting to be based in surgeries.
“Our aim is to better use all health, social care and community resources available and to reduce health inequalities which exist in some areas and for some more vulnerable groups.”
If you would like to be involved in future engagement opportunities, to help us develop this new community mental health care system, please email mentalhealth.communications@covwarkpt.nhs.uk. 