Agenda item

The Strategic Director for Social Care and Education will share the draft Mental Health Strategy for comment.

Members of the Commission are recommended to receive the report and pass any comments to the Strategic Director for Social Care and Education.

The Strategic Director Social Care and Education submitted a report providing Members of the Commission an opportunity to comment on the draft Leicester City Joint Integrated Commissioning Strategy for Adult Mental Health – 2021 to 2025.

The Head of Commissioning, Adult Social Care and the Lead Commissioner, Adult Social Care introduced the report.

Members noted that:

·         Mental health was now recognised as the largest single cause of disability in UK.

·         The report set out a draft strategy attempting to bring mental health into parity with physical health.

·         The draft strategy was informed by the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health published by the government in 2016 and builds on the first strategy in place from 2015-2019.

·         The draft strategy focused on three key themes, Prevention, Accommodation, and Employment Education and Volunteering.

·         Work had been carried out with public health colleagues around the impact of Covid upon people’s mental health and the predicted impact of that on services which would be included in the next draft version. There was expected to be an increase in people with mental health issues of 10-20% as result of Covid, so the strategy needed to be finalised around that, to inform and monitor services.

·         The strategy included an action plan with the same three key themes, this focused on making improvements across health and social care and with services we support that deliver in the community. There would also be a pathfinder led by health in conjunction with partners.

Members welcomed the opportunity to consider and discuss the draft strategy.

In terms of the cross over between addiction and mental health issues and how the strategy addressed that, it was recognised that a lot of the people being supported were also known as dual diagnosis with their mental health being affected by some form of addiction, there were services funded to help those with substance misuse and their mental health issues too. Public health officers were also part of the Mental Health Partnership Board and, another element in the strategy was around housing and people coming through the homelessness route or through health services/hospital route.

There was discussion around suicide prevention which included timeliness to intervention and whether there were resources to be responsive at that most vulnerable time such as a rapid response team. It was advised that the public health team were leading on work relating to suicide prevention noting there were services supporting people on that pathway with good work being done.

A member of the commission commented that the police had a crisis negotiating team as they sadly had to deal with people on many occasions threatening suicide in a public way and it was suggested that officers should talk to that crisis team to learn or debrief. It was confirmed that at an operational level officers did connect with crisis response teams and through the suicide prevention group broader themes were considered. Officers welcomed the suggestions and agreed to consider how the more granular detail in terms of a suicide response service could be built into the strategy.

Regarding the integrated care service and County involvement, officers informed that was still evolving and therefore difficult to comment in relation to services currently provided in the community but there was work going on across a range of partners, and officers were keeping a watching brief on that.

In terms of there being “no wrong door” and in relation to substance abuse services, there  it was noted there were different approaches between the City and County councils but certainly regarding mental health the County council were on board in terms of the approach being taken by the City. It was advised that currently health colleagues were redesigning health services and the county were engaged in that so in terms of health it did spread wider than just the City boundary.

Discussion moved on to the effects of the pandemic noting there was some prediction of what Covid would produce but that could be a long speculative conversation, there was concern that there could be very large numbers of people presenting with mental health issues and anxiety and whether there were measures to prioritise or scale services to address and meet needs. Officers responded that they had begun to monitor services in place such as

mental health recovery services, which saw a dip in demand last year but expected demand to increase and those services had received additional funding through health. Other services such as advocacy services helping those with mental health were also monitored and consideration would be given to how services were being impacted, including looking at any trends or increased demand upon certain services.

Members suggested that within the concept of building resilience it would be helpful to share values e.g. differing beliefs around mental health across different communities and understanding those. Officers agreed to take that suggestion to the partnership board to consider what implications there might be.

It was also suggested that the Mental health, resilience and inequalities report published by WHO Europe might contain useful suggestions or points that could be incorporated into the draft strategy.

Members queried the percentages given in the report relating to annual health checks this was clarified that by taking the current situation of people who received an annual health check this was less than 60% so the CCG were setting themselves a higher target to achieve of 60%, not that only 60% needed it but that current performance was lower.

The Chair thanked officers for their work on the strategy and Members for their contributions to the discussion and suggestions for officers to take into account.

It was noted that comments and updates were awaited from colleagues in Health before finalising and taking the strategy to the Mental Health Partnership Board for formal sign off.

AGREED:

1.    That the contents of the draft Leicester City Joint Integrated Commissioning Strategy for Adult Mental Health 2021-2025 be noted,

2.    That the comments of the commission on the draft Leicester City Joint Integrated Commissioning Strategy for Adult Mental Health 2021-2025 as set out above be noted and considered,

3.    That the Commission receive an update at a future meeting on the finalised strategy and its implementation.