Our work with mental health

On this page:

Overview

In Mental Health, we are looking at how we and our partners in the mental health justice system can achieve best value for money and continue to increase the numbers of people helped.

We are working with the Tribunal Service Mental Health (TSMH) and the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales to improve efficiency and effectiveness for the benefit of:

In order to achieve this we have a dedicated team of Regional Mental Health Leads.  It is their responsibility to identify local issues and deal with these where possible.  The regional leads must liaise with their local counterparts in the TSMH, and maintain a close working relationship with providers.

Not all problems can be solved locally.  Any national issues identified are dealt with centrally by a combination of the regional leads, the Mental Health Unit, and the Mental Health Policy Team.

It is clear that our approach is already working.  Liz Ralph Operations Manager at the Tribunal Service Mental Health has said that the benefits the tribunal service have got from the initiative include: "Communication links to solicitors, eg: promotion of using correct forms, a platform to raise problems with solicitors and also a platform to obtain feedback from solicitors on process".

Our Priorities

Our main priority in mental health is to target issues in the tribunal process that clients use to challenge the terms of their detention under the Mental Health Act 1983.  Over the last year, we have worked hand in hand with providers and the TSMH to identify and target areas for potential improvements here.

We have now set a formal target to measure the effectiveness of this work (see below). At the same time, we will continue to build and develop close relationships with more of our partners in the tribunal process.  In particular, we will seek to involve the NHS in future discussions and planning.

Regional Work

At a regional level, our mental health leads have achieved:

National work

Centrally, regional leads, along with the Mental Health Unit and Mental Health Policy Team, have achieved:

Target for 2009-10

Having concentrated on relationship building and identifying priority areas in 2008-09, we are now in a position to set a quantified target.  In December and January we carried out a file review of 180 tribunal cases with adjourned hearings.  This showed that some adjournments were avoidable.  Therefore, in 2009-10 we will have a target to:

Looking forward, we aim to be able to have joint target with the TSMH in place for 2010-11.

Contact Us

If you want to learn more about the work we do in mental health, please contact your local LSC Mental Health Regional Lead (see documents panel for details).  In particular, please feel free to raise an issue with regard to efficiency and/or effectiveness of the tribunal process in your region.

If you have details of issues that you believe need to be investigated nationally, please contact Oliver Toop, Policy Developer in the Mental Health Policy Team.


 

Last updated: 11 May 2009

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