SURREY mental health and learning disability services for children and young people are changing for the better, thanks to a financial boost.
Chief executive Fiona Edwards said:“At Surrey and Borders, we are incredibly proud to be leading an innovative partnership of 15 national and local voluntary, statutory and private providers, all of whom have proven track records in delivering services to children and young people.
“With an almost 30 per cent increase in funding, we are both excited and confident that the service will bring much wider benefits to the mental health and well-being of Surrey’s children and young people.”
Surrey’s NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, which plan and buy local services, and Surrey County Council have invested an extra £2.3million to improve the services.
The increased funding has allowed the trust to provide new treatment pathways designed to enable children and young people to access services at an earlier stage and extend its reach to vulnerable groups – such as those young people who are leaving care, or who have suffered sexual trauma.
The partnership model provides not only services to meet the complex needs of young people, but also early support in a variety of ways, including guided self-help and online counselling.
The newly launched behaviour and neurodevelopment service is specifically designed to provide information, advice, guidance and treatment for children, young people and their families.
A key change to the way services are provided is making Mindsight Surrey CAMHS the single point of contact for referrals.
It is open from 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday and Saturday mornings, and will take referrals from health, education and social care practitioners and provide advice to young people and their families.
Call 0300 222 5755 for full details.
Mindsight is managed by Beacon UK, and will ensure those being referred are put in contact with the right service and get the appropriate level of treatment and support.
In another development, the Department of Health commended the trust for “outstanding levels of openness and transparency” following a new Government drive to improve patient safety.
Surrey and Borders Partnership was one of 18 NHS trusts, out of a total of 230, to receive the commendation in the DoH ‘Learning from Mistakes League’.
The league table is part of a new initiative by Health Secretary and South West Surrey MP Jeremy Hunt, to do more to improve the safety of people using NHS services.
It is produced from an analysis of data from the NHS Staff Survey and information about patient safety incidents held by the National Patient Safety Agency.
In January, the Surrey and Borders Partnership’s clinical risk and safety team won the regional Patient Safety Award at the Kent Surrey Sussex Academic Health Science Network.
The award recognised the team’s proactive approach to protecting the safety of people who use the trust’s services.
The team has recently introduced a new best practice model to improve the way serious incidents are investigated so that lessons are quickly learned and acted upon with speed across the organisation.
Trust chief executive Fiona Edwards (right) is included in the list of ‘top 50 NHS chief executives’ compiled by Health Service Journal.
She received specific praise for leading an organisation that is “known for innovation with a strong focus on research”.
Surrey and Borders Partnership is running a number of high-profile research projects, including trials of a modifying drug for Alzheimer Disease and trials of a fingerprint study that can determine, from analysing a single fingerprint, if a person has taken an illicit drug.
One of the the trust’s innovations was the roll out of the award-winning Safe Haven concept, in which Safe Havens provide people undergoing a mental health crisis with professional out-of-hours support.
The trust has launched a recovery college so people can take courses in how better to manage their mental health to help them stay well.
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