Strong connections: how Scotland is connecting with others on mental health
Last year, Scotland’s 10-year mental health strategy was launched, with improving access to services and supporting earlier intervention at its heart.
The strategy also includes steps to improve delivery of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services – including an audit to look at concerns over rejected referrals.
With 40 actions, the strategy is wide-ranging. Part of it includes a review of counselling and guidance services in schools to ensure they are delivering for children and young people, and establishing a bi-annual forum of mental health experts to help guide the implementation of the strategy in the coming years.
Minister for Mental Health Maureen Watt said: “As Scotland’s first dedicated Minister for Mental Health, I have been driven by a simple principle – that we must prevent and treat mental health problems with the same commitment and drive as we do physical health.
“This guiding ambition is at the heart of the new mental health strategy, working to intervene as early as possible to prevent issues developing while ensuring anyone need only ask once to get the help they need fast.
“This strategy has been fundamentally shaped by the feedback from organisations and service users. Their views have demonstrated passion and the need for change.
“Whether in schools, workplaces, communities or care facilities, we will take forward an initial 40 actions to shape change and ensure mental health has true parity of esteem with physical health.”
Meanwhile, looking outwith Scotland, we are already leading the way in mental health.
Dr Amar Shah is a consultant forensic psychiatrist and Chief Quality Officer at East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT). He leads at executive and board level on quality at ELFT, including quality improvement, quality assurance, quality control and quality planning, and has been working with colleagues in Scotland for the past five years.
Speaking to Holyrood, he said: “Scotland is really one of the places that we looked to learn from when we started thinking about how we use quality improvement to tackle some of our most complex challenges in health care.
“We’re a provider of mental health, community health and some primary care but mostly out of hospital services to a population of about 1.5 million people.
“We’re now almost five years into our improvement journey and from the very beginning, when we were thinking about where we would go about this work, Scotland was one of the places we visited to learn from.
“We’ve brought a range of different people up to some of the learning sessions that the Scottish Patient Safety Programme has run in mental health, we’ve also come up and visited some of the boards to see what the work feels like in an organisation.
“We’ve taken a lot of learning from that around how we apply quality improvement in our organisation. Some of the things we’ve done have been very similar to Scotland, some we’ve gone about differently but having a partner that we can learn from, and who is really open to sharing what they’ve done, how they’ve done it, and their successes and learning along the way has been really helpful to us.
“It can be quite a lonely journey, particularly at the beginning and an uncertain one, when you start completely shifting your mental health model and how you’re going to run your organisation and solve problems, so to have people that we could turn to in confidence has been really helpful.”
Shah added that over the past few years, the nature of how they work with Scotland has changed.
He said: “Now we’ve got some experience of running improvement projects in our field, we are really closely linked to the Scottish Patient Safety Programme in mental health. We do a lot of sharing together on topics we are jointly tackling and to see if we can learn together.
“Scotland and East London Foundation Trust also jointly lead the international community of quality improvement in mental health.
“That was something which was born from our two passions for improvement, there is a lot of similar work going on and a desire to learn together and from wherever we could.
“There’re some concrete examples of things we’ve done to share learning. In February, a team from here came up to Scotland to run a session on improvement access and flow in
psychological services. The Healthcare Improvement Scotland team invited psychological services from across Scotland to come to that event and share some of the work they have been doing, and we shared some of the work we’ve been doing and ran some coaching sessions to help the Scottish team to look at their next steps.
“We’re always looking for opportunities to accelerate the pace of improvement through collaborating and sharing ideas and learning from each other.”
Shah said this international network meets up once or twice a year and at the start of May, about 80 people from 11 different countries came together to share the work they are doing in mental health using quality improvement.
Mental health services in Scotland are still on a journey and looking outwith Scotland is going to be vital to this.
Maureen Watt added: “The [mental health] strategy is just a first step, and I believe working with stakeholders and with MSPs across the parliament, it can be built on in the years to come. I believe together we can deliver the mental health support, care and services that the people of Scotland deserve.”
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