A PIONEERING ‘crisis cafe’ offering a vital refuge for people in mental distress across the Farnham and Aldershot area welcomed a very important visitor on Monday.

Prime Minister Theresa May came to Aldershot’s Well-being Centre and Safe Haven cafe to find out more about the service following the Government’s announcement it intends to transform mental health support across the country.

The Prime Minister announced the package of reforms to improve mental health support at every stage of a person’s life throughout society - including schools, workplaces and communities.

Mrs May said: “For too long mental illness has been something of a hidden injustice in our country, shrouded in a completely unacceptable stigma and dangerously disregarded as a secondary issue to physical health.

“Yet left unaddressed, it destroys lives, it separates people from each other and deepens the divisions within our society. Changing this goes right to the heart of our humanity; to the heart of the kind of country we are, the attitudes we hold and the values we share.

“I want us to employ the power of government as a force for good to transform the way we deal with mental health problems right across society, and at every stage of life.”

Part of the measures to improve mental health support include funding to find alternatives to hospital to support people in the community.

The Prime Minister recognised that seeing a GP or going to Accident and Emergency (A&E) may not always be the right intervention for many people with mental ill-health.

The government has pledged to build on its £15m investment to provide and promote new models of community-based care such as crisis cafes and community clinics.

The initial £15m investment led to 88 new places of safety being created and the government now plans to spend up to a further £15m to build on this success.

The Safe Haven at the Well-being Centre in Aldershot, is one such crisis cafe which has gone from strength to strength since it opened in 2014.

The service, which provides out-of-hours support to people experiencing, or are on the verge of, mental health crisis, allows individuals to drop in without an appointment.

It was developed in line with the express wishes of mental health service users and they have been involved in its design and development.

They can chat with other people in a similar situation to their own, to sit by themselves if they wish, in the knowledge that they are supported, or they can talk to the qualified mental health professionals staffing the service.

Many people have said they attended the Safe Haven as an alternative to visiting A&E while acute mental health admissions from the service’s catchment area fell by a third in the first three months after opening, helping people to receive the support they need as close to their home as possible.

The Prime Minister visited the cafe and talked with staff and people who have used the service, many of whom reported that the Safe Haven has stopped them from attending A&E when they have been experiencing a mental health crisis.

Some even revealed that, for them, the support they have received from the Safe Haven has probably saved their life.

The crisis cafe concept proved so popular in Aldershot that work began to roll it out across a number of locations in Surrey and there are now six Safe Havens serving the people of North East Hampshire and Surrey.

More information about the Safe Havens in Surrey and Aldershot can be found online on the website www.sabp.nhs.uk/services/mental-health/adult/safe-havens.