I had a great visit to St George’s Mental Health Trust where chief executive Vanessa Ford showed me the new Trinity building at Springfield University Hospital in South West London. The new development is part of a £150m investment co-designed with patients and service users. It forms part of the new Springfield Village development, where mental health facilities sit alongside residential housing and retail shops as part of of one integrated community.
The team took me around an adult inpatient ward where I was able to see first-hand the spacious and calm environment which supports patient care. The ward is utilising digital solutions as part of its approach to improving responsive and effective care; their digital whiteboard helps with patient flow and discharge challenges.
The trust’s Bluebell ward provides a remarkable nationally commissioned service for deaf and blind people with mental health conditions. Many of the staff are deaf and sign language is the chief means of communication, with sign interpreters supporting vital communication.
I saw staff using touch sign with a deafblind patient which demonstrated the care, compassion and sensitivity used to communicate and connect with patients. This patient told me about her positive experience on the ward and the crucial role played by the staff. The trust’s deaf recovery package ‘All about me’ offers a structured framework for patients to engage in their care plan and communicate their needs effectively. Together with the mental health crisis plan, these provide vital resources for patients to access and benefit from team expertise.
The context for community mental health services is a challenging one for the NHS. The team leading on these services gave me a great insight to their challenges and achievements. With a growing caseload of nearly 9,000 patients, these services are under real pressure. To address this, they’re two years into transforming adult community mental health, focusing on prevention, talking therapies, partnerships with primary care and voluntary sector organisations and, crucially, new roles to respond to new service models and pressure on clinical staff numbers.
"I was taken with the commitment and dedication of all the staff I met to tackle the fundamental underlying issues of mental health service delivery and to care for patients and service users with compassion and respect."
The role of the trust as an anchor institution is central to this transformation programme, particularly given the varied social and economic landscape of South West London. It has a strong focus on health inequalities with a programme addressing ethnicity and mental health improvement, tackling entrenched inequality in access to mental health services experienced by ethnic minority citizens. The success of the community transformation programme is central to the capital plans for inpatient services and Vanessa and her team set out a clear and compelling vision of how these services need to further develop and improve over the coming years.
I left inspired and impressed by the transformation of community services, investment in staff skills development and progress on capital redevelopment, which aims to create a positive environment for people with mental health needs within a wider village development.
Most of all, I was taken with the commitment and dedication of all the staff I met to tackle the fundamental underlying issues of mental health service delivery and to care for patients and service users with compassion and respect.
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