Visit to Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust

This week Daniel Elkeles visited Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust to witness an extraordinary re-imagining of how to provide mental health services for a community with significant and increasing need.

Daniel said: "The existing care model deliberately set many hurdles for patients to get access to secondary care mental health services designed to manage demand away. Patients, staff and in particular GPs were very unhappy with the service model. They embarked on a complete transformation of their service with one core design principle - how smooth can we make the service for patients and clinicians?"

They have done this by:

🔵 Organising staff into either community-facing or treatment teams.

🔵Funding band 7 mental health nurse practitioners in each Primary Care Network across the Tees Valley population (via ARRS), supervised by consultant psychiatrists.

🔵Appointing band 4 health practitioners to support patients transferred back to primary care.

🔵Funding pharmacy posts to improve medicines management in primary care.

🔵Employing care navigators to free up clinical coordinators for patient care.

🔵Delivering care in community settings like the Hartlepool Community Hub (formerly the town library), helping to de-stigmatise mental health services.

🔵Moving from individual consultant caseloads to shared team caseloads.

🔵Holding weekly multi-agency 'huddles' with statutory and voluntary sector partners to discuss complex patients.

🔵Having community teams in-reach into inpatient wards to support discharge.

The results are staggering:

🔵 Patients receiving more than two contacts a year have risen from 2,500 to 9,000.

🔵Referrals into secondary mental health services have reduced by 20%, with average waits now just two weeks and a 'no rejection' policy.

🔵Inpatient bed use has fallen significantly: no private beds are needed, utilisation is at 85%, and 12+ hour waits in Emergency Departments are almost eliminated.

"Thank you so much to Beverley, Ranjeet, Elspeth, Lynsey, and Naomi for such an inspiring visit."