Agenda item

Ms Vanessa Odlin, the Director of Hillingdon and Mental Health at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL), provided an update on mental health crisis action that had been taken in the Borough.  The Cove Crisis Café had been commissioned from Hestia and access had been changed so that individuals could self-refer.  Although there had been a subsequent increase in the number of attendances, this had not continued to grow.  To address this, consideration was being given to further publicising the open access – the service had previously been publicised on social media and via partners and the communications strategy would need to be relaunched. 

Concern was expressed at the low referral rate to the Cove Crisis Café and that feedback had identified the service as not being open during operational hours and staff being cold in their approach.  It was recognised that action had been taken to address these issues and that there was a need to ensure good training for staff in terms of their role and expectations of them.  Chasing The Stigma would be providing first aid training for staff as well as to other organisations in Hillingdon. 

Consideration would need to be given to whether or not Hestia was the right organisation to provide the Cove Crisis Café.  To this end, further work would be needed to monitor performance against the contract brief. 

The Board was advised that a Hillingdon Young Adult Pathway Lead had been appointed and interviews had taken place for a Young Adult Psychiatrist to support the 16-25 Young Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing Partnership Model.  Further work was planned to develop this initiative.  Although this recruitment was welcomed, concern was expressed that there had been much discussion about the support available for 16-25 year olds in crisis over many years.  Despite this, Hillingdon was still not currently providing a robust crisis pathway and could not deliver appropriate, timely service alternatives to A&E.  This had had a detrimental impact on service users’ health and wellbeing. 

Insofar as the Crisis House was concerned, Ms Odlin advised that consideration had been given to identifying gaps in the service, with a twelve month pilot starting in April 2022.  In addition, a mental health emergency centre had been piloted but this had reduced the number of Section 136 beds available in Riverside.  Discussions were being undertaken with the police regarding street triage to try to address some of these issues but work needed to be done at the right place and time within the resources that were available. 

The Board welcomed the transparency of the report.  Dr Kuldhir Johal, Interim Borough GP Clinical Advisor of the North West London Clinical Commissioning Group (NWL CCG), advised that GPs had regular contact with young people aged 16-25 with mental health issues.  It was suggested that providing information on the CNWL website would enable GPs to use the hyperlinks to promote the crisis pathway services that were available.  It would be important to have smarter ways to access information and services and to maintain a two-way interactive conversation. 

Ms Odlin recognised that improvements were needed in the availability of information on the website and the advertising of services as currently it was not particularly interactive or intuitive.  Work was already underway to develop the website to ensure that all information was available but this would take a couple of months to complete.  The café had remained open during the pandemic so work would need to be undertaken with Hestia to get feedback from patients to establish what services and facilities they wanted.  Conversations were already being held with the Council to identify a better location for the café that had access to public transport links and a wider offer was needed in Hillingdon to bring services together. 

The Board recognised that the crisis pathway was on a journey and needed to plan how it was going to develop.  The local authority would be doing more on digital presence over the next few months and it was suggested that this be done collectively and include the HHCP digitisation programme.  This could result in developing a place-based resource, with maintenance being undertaken between the partners.  An update on progress of the crisis pathway and digital presence would be brought to the Board’s next meeting on 14 June 2022.

RESOLVED:  That:

1.    the updates in respect of mental health crisis services be noted; and

2.    an update on progress of the crisis pathway and digital presence be brought to the meeting on 14 June 2022.