Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust have released a partnership strategy with the aim of improving wellbeing and tackling inequalities faced by people with mental illness.
The two trusts are to work together alongside their partners to tackle the wider factors that negatively impact health. Working to ensure that everyone has the means to take care of themselves, the trusts also highlight a need to look after after their staff to ensure that they can provide high quality care for patients, carers and service users.
By developing this strategy, the trusts believe that can achieve more for residents by:
- Creating a “greater sense of wellbeing” for communities and service users.
- Tackling health inequalities that are faced by people with mental illness.
- Ensuring patients and local communities receive “equity of outcome and equality of access.”
- Creating a healthy and safe place to work.
- Using information and data to better understand the needs of residents.
- Dedicating more resources to innovation and research.
- Improving the joint estate in creating therapeutic environments.
- Being environmentally friendly.
For citizens, the trusts will work together to improve health and wellbeing of communities and people, whilst focusing on delivering an inclusive and diverse partnership to aid career development for staff.
The strategic aims
The partnership strategy is built upon four strategic aims:
- Delivering high quality and effective treatment and care for service users, closer to home.
- Ensuring equity of outcome no matter where people live and background.
- Becoming an employer of choice and giving staff space and time to deliver better care.
- Embracing digital and innovation within care delivery.
Each aim set out in the strategy is created from the views of carers and service users across both organisations and are also interconnected.
Here we explore each aim in more detail.
Aim one: delivering high quality and effective treatment and care for service users, closer to home.
The strategy highlights that they will identify and “standardise world-class practice, to provide outstanding care.” They will:
- Ensure services are operating consistently while supporting people in bettering their wellbeing.
- Provide services to support people in their own community and home.
- Embed a “culture of continuous learning and quality improvement” at every stage of the partnership.
- Make sure services across the five boroughs have the right resources.
- Improve access to specialist services.
Both trusts will also work with service users, carers and patients in co-producing services. They are aiming to improve their care delivery by engaging patients who have had recent experiences of the services which include friends, family and carers.
Aim two: ensuring equity of outcome no matter where people live and their background.
The strategy highlights that health inequalities must be tackled by working together to provide care earlier and closer to home. This includes local communities getting the right treatment and care in line with their needs.
They will use data and insights from system partners to produce a clear image of the overall community and their needs. Clinical models will also use insight to reduce variation.
Working to focus on place-based care and support, the trusts will aim to build up networks within neighbourhoods and work alongside the community and voluntary industry to better understand the individual needs of a person.
Outreach and prevention will also be focused on by developing treatment pathways and reduce deterioration. Alongside this, they are working to recognise how impactful traumatic events can be and will include further knowledge about trauma.
Aim three: Becoming an employer of choice and giving staff space and time to deliver better care.
The strategy outlines how the trusts will create a fair, just and anti-racist culture that focuses on inclusion and diversity.
Aim three also works to reduce staff vacancies and increase retention, with the trusts pledging to create more opportunities for staff development alongside launching a training academy.
Aim four: Embracing digital and innovation within care delivery.
The final aim of the strategy highlights how they will take a strengths-based approach and provide digital tools to allow patients to regulate and self-manage their mental health and wellbeing.
The partnership will explore research in education facilities and new clinical practices. They will also embed “a culture of continuous learning and quality improvement.”
Finally, they are to work on expanding their services to help more people and create new partnerships to grow their services where it is needed.
Enabling strategies
In order to deliver these aims, a number of enabling strategies have been created by the trusts, including:
- Sustainability: working towards delivering net zero and supporting diverse local populations by improving the access to education and employment.
- Equalities: creating a fair, just and anti-racist culture.
- People: creating a “shared culture and identity” throughout the five Boroughs to bring the teams together; “including developing an organisational development strategy.”
- Finance: making efficiencies in minimising “overheads and prioritise resources” and provide investment by the partnership strategy.
- Clinical: developing their clinical model together to “drive out variation and improve outcomes and access.”
The strategy is a first draft that has been based on early engagement work. It highlights that further work needs to be conducted on the roadmap and programmes and enabling strategies to see how the partnership will make an impact and how success will be measured. When this has been completed, the final strategy will be developed.
To view the strategy in full, click here.
