Highly commended for our work on mental health

Healthwatch award for ‘improving health and social care’

Our work on mental health and the co-production approach we took was highly commended at this year’s Healthwatch National Network Awards held in Birmingham.

The award celebrates our work to improve local mental health support by encouraging service users to share their experiences of mental health services. It also recognises the work we have done with NHS services and local organisations to respond to what local people said matters to them.

Jo Brown and Paul Jones attended the award ceremony at the national Healthwatch conference and led a workshop on the importance of co-production to the success of this project.

Our work on mental health crisis support

It’s vital that people going through a mental health crisis get the right support quickly. In North Tyneside, however, we found that people were struggling to access crisis care when they needed it.

Working with people who’ve experienced a mental health crisis, their carers, mental health professionals and service commissioners, we spoke with over 200 people about their experiences of using services in a mental health crisis. People shared their views through surveys, focus groups and telephone interviews to ensure a range of people’s experiences were heard.

Based on the feedback we received, we worked with those involved to coproduce 15 ways services could improve the care they provided, which included adopting a trusted assessment so that service users don’t have to be reassessed multiple times by different services and developing a lower level crisis support service for those who do not meet the threshold for the crisis team and were often left with no support.

People’s experiences have now been used by North Tyneside Clinical Commissioning Group to commission a new low-level crisis service, showing how putting people at the heart of care can improve the support available to them.

This was part of a package of work to improve mental health services in North Tyneside. This included co-producing an information leaflet about local mental health support groups that people can self-refer to. Also supporting service users and decision makers to come together to have conversations about the key challenges service users face though the Kosmos project.

Read more about our work on mental health