Category Archives: mental health

Peer support for service users like Chill4us is for Carers

Why providers should invest in peer support for service users

A group of charitable providers have set up an independent organisation to provide peer support to service users. This approach can help improve service quality, efficiency and flexibility, say Bernd Sass and Sue Taylor.

 

Monday 22 April 2013 14:50

Providers have long been told of the need to personalise their services and use any such redesign as an opportunity to involve and empower people with support needs. At the same time ‘lived experience’ has been seen as the answer to many problems in access to services and in achieving lasting and positive health and independent living outcomes, not to mention productivity gains. Yet little concrete action has followed from either providers or commissioners to bring the multiple positive effects of peer support to fruition.

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Now a consortium of charities in the North East has set up an independent user-led organisation for disabled people in order to change this. Peer Support North East has been established as a community interest company by Age UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Your Voice Counts, Mental Health Matters and Sight Service Gateshead.
It now has 20 mentors who are supporting 350 of their peers a month, with disabled and older people supporting each other across age ranges and impairment groups, cutting across the boundaries between services.

Does no one care what is happening to mental health services?

More than 40 mental health workers in Norfolk have been told they are being made redundant as part of a restructure of an NHS trust, it was announced today.

Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust said 41 members of staff, who work in Norwich and West Norfolk, had been issued with notices of redundancy following a consultation.

The mental health trust is planning to cut 502 out of 2,128 posts and 20pc of its inpatient beds by 2016 in order to balance its books.

Patients in East Anglia will receive care in a “timely and effective manner”

East of England Ambulance Service creates new posts

Maria Ball Maria Ball had been in post since the the trust was formed

An under-fire ambulance service has announced is to create new managements posts, a day after its chairwoman resigned.

The East of England Ambulance Service failed to meet standards in care and welfare in a recent Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection.

Maria Ball resigned on Wednesday, after five years in post.

The ambulance service, which has been ordered to improve, said it would create three new sector leads.

It means the work of the ambulance service in Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire will be managed separately to Norfolk and Suffolk, and Essex.

A spokesman said powers were being devolved to a local level, with sector leads and general managers, to “ensure that staff are empowered to make changes that are needed locally”.

Last week’s CQC report came after months of complaints about response times.