Juliet Lyon CBE, Independent Chair of the Open Mental Health VCSE Alliance reflects on our first conference
The Open Mental Health Conference in Somerset set everyone thinking. How do you transform community mental health services? What makes for a good, strong partnership between the NHS and the voluntary sector? What do equality and co-production mean in practice? Is ‘no wrong door’ an achievable goal? How do you gauge success/impact?
Some of the answers we heard lay in people ‘being brave’ and ‘working empathetically’. One of the few positives from the onset of the Covid pandemic had been the imperative to ‘get on with things’ and ‘avoid getting mired in bureaucracy’. Flexible contracts had been agreed and innovative structures developed to enable people to respond to need and not necessarily have to shoehorn everyone into existing services. Essentially it was, and continues to be, about people working together.
There is an important distinction to be made between, the principle of consultation – talking to service users about their views on, and levels of satisfaction with, existing services; and co-production – working with experts by experience on an equal basis to determine future services. At the conference, experts by experience acknowledged that this way of working could come at high cost to themselves but that the gains, in terms of responsiveness and relevance of services, were immeasurably greater.
Not everything was right yet. The lack of an integrated and properly accessible system for information sharing still presented an unacceptable risk. The joining up of services could, and should, extend to policing and justice, as well as ambulance services. Preventative work and ongoing support is so much safer than crisis-driven services alone.
Overall there was a sense of ‘getting there’. Early indications are that a ‘no wrong door’ approach combined with a system of ‘warm transfers’, rather than more nebulous, less useful, ‘signposting’, are leading to reduced pressure on accident and emergency services and fewer adult mental health admissions. It’s still early days but there is a sense of pride in what has been achieved so far. And an openness in sharing what is going well together with a determination to do better still.
Just over half the 120 conference delegates came from across the country. Hopefully they found some new ways of working that could be adapted to their localities and met some new Somerset friends to act as sounding boards and supporters. The test will be if Open Mental Health goes viral and leads to a radical rethink of community mental health services across England. And a more rounded response to need.