Issue - meetings

24.1     The Strategic Commissioning Manager (Mental Health) introduced the report, providing the following additional information:

·         The Phase 1 services have been rolled into one contract to reduce overheads. The Wellbeing Centres already existed and there was a desire to continue these in an integrated way with new services.

·         The Personality Disorder Service will operate six days a week and will be fully operational by mid-December 2017.

·         The Crisis Cafes will open until 11pm each day and will link to other available services. The first café will open in Hastings and the model will then roll out to Eastbourne, with both aiming to be fully operational by Christmas 2017.

·         East Sussex was an early adopter of supported employment which has been operational locally for 10 years. The local model is seen as best practice and helps around 200 people with long term mental health conditions back into work annually. The service works closely with crisis teams to help people retain employment.

·         The Community Connector service is new but developed from two previous services. It aims to link people into mainstream services with support. The social prescribing aspect has been piloted in relation to welfare debt, housing, social and other support and saw a 60% reduction in people accessing GP appointments. The Community Connector service will target GP practices with high users of service.

·         The ‘hard to engage’ service has traditionally been provided by Seaview – it aims to build trust with service users and supports access to other services.

24.2     Further points were made in response to questions from the committee as follows:

·         Services expect to be supporting people with multiple needs and will link into drug and alcohol services.

·         The Personality Disorder Service target of engaging with 75 clients per year is linked to the available resource but also how services are being used at the moment. There is currently high use of specialist services by the target group, with poor outcomes, and the new service has been set clear outcomes for clients which are also linked to the impact on other services. There will be wider benefits to a larger group of clients through building the personality disorder expertise of the less specialist services.

·         The Crisis Cafes will operate until 11pm, seven days a week. There is expected to be a consequent reduction in instances of crisis and reduced impact on other services like A&E.

·         The expectation for the Employment Support Service of engaging with 500 clients reflects the total number the service works with each year. This results in 200 (40%) going into employment which is in line with the target. This 40% are able to move away from services and rehabilitate in a different way in the community. The other 300 clients still get positive outcomes from their engagement such as opportunities for voluntary work.

·         The newly commissioned services are funded in large part by different use of established budgets. The new services (Personality Disorder Service, Crisis Cafés and social prescribing) are all Clinical Commissioning Group  ...  view the full minutes text for item 24