South London and Maudsley awarded funding for a pilot 24/7 community mental health service in Lewisham
The NHS is launching six neighbourhood centres to provide local support to people with serious mental illness, and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust have been selected to deliver one of these centres.
The new mental health centre will be for people in Catford, Hither Green, Lee, Blackheath and Central Lewisham. People will be able to receive clinical care and support for health needs, while also having access to expertise that can help with other important issues that may impact on their wellbeing and recovery such as housing or employment.
The pilot will be testing whether we can help to eliminate waiting times by having an ‘open access’ model, with people able to self-refer or walk in and receive support in real time. The centres will be run by the NHS in partnership with a range of local colleagues in health and social care including voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VSCFE) sector organisations.
Following NHS England’s funding, South London and Maudsley will now begin to prepare for implementation with the hope of opening doors to the new centre in 2025.
The bid was led by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, as part of the Lewisham Mental Health Alliance. The funding follows two years of listening to and working with service users, carers, clinical leaders, staff, voluntary organisations, community leaders, councillors and partner organisations. The preparatory work will include changes to long-standing cultural practices and processes. The pilot is expected to run for two years.
Sir Norman Lamb, Chair, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust said:
I am hugely excited that we have been awarded this funding from NHS England. This award comes from years of hard work with the local community and our partner organisations at the Lewisham Mental Health Alliance to look at how we can deliver a new community based mental health care model. We can now plan to deliver the new centre, which will make a real difference to first line mental health care for people in Lewisham and beyond.
David Bradley, Chief Executive, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust said:
We are grateful for the opportunity this pilot gives us to resource a community service to bring a more robust, proactive and safe community mental health offer for people who have the most serious mental health needs. It will focus on building trusting relationships with clients, shaping care around what matters to people and their families, and giving the team the resources it needs to work intensively with those who need it most.
About the Lewisham pilot centre
Lewisham has been one of the six successful areas to secure £2.5m for this project, which will provide a one-stop shop as called for by patients and carers.
Some of its features will include:
- A focus on people’s life story, their needs and aspirations as determined by them and their families and networks (including but not so dominated by their clinical diagnosis, risks and symptoms)
- A wider range of purposeful interventions that mental health services are not usually resourced to meet. The first and most important intervention, being to build a relationship and trust between professionals and clients
- More therapies, improved medication management, and a range of social interventions including employment, leisure activities, social inclusion, accommodation, drug and alcohol issues and physical health care
- Greater involvement of the local voluntary sector who offer expertise, trust and grass roots relationships with the community in a way that the NHS and Local Authority cannot
- Addressing inequalities for black communities in mental health services. This is a particular priority for Lewisham given that the borough has the highest proportion of its community with a black ethnicity of any in the country
- An aspiration to eliminate waiting times entirely by testing an ‘open access’ model with real time access to self-refer or walk-in
- A day service function, led by peer support workers and other people with lived experience of services - with a clinical and therapeutic schedule as well as social inclusion, lunches and activities
- More options to support people whose needs are escalating towards crisis, including more intensive support om homes, in the day service and local guest beds to offer hospitality and a ‘softer landing’ for people experiencing crisis
- More assertive, intensive and creative efforts to engage people who we have traditionally not managed to engage with service offers and are at greatest risk of relapsing
- Overall aim to improve quality of life indicators, reduce hospitalisation and coercive practices
Linked to the pilot (which will be in one Lewisham's neighbourhoods), an exciting new partnership with voluntary and community organisations is being funded to support people with mental health needs across Lewisham through more social, practical and creative support, tailored to meet different cultural needs of our black and ethnically diverse communities. We expect this will include peer support, advocacy, debt/finance, social inclusions, leisure, arts and sports. This ‘voluntary sector cooperative’ will operate borough-wide, including the new pilot service.
