Community Mental Health Service survey 2021 – Our results

The Care Quality Commission has recently published the results of a survey about our community mental health services.

Each year our Trust takes part in a mandatory survey led by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to ask our service users for their views about the support and care they receive from our Community Mental Health Teams.

323 service users completed the survey. The majority of scores received for our Trust sit in the intermediate 60% of the 50 Trusts surveyed.  We had 6 scores in the top 20% range and 3 scores in the bottom 20% range.

The survey was carried out between September and November 2020, when we had to deliver our services in a very different way due to the pandemic.  It’s likely that this had some impact on the survey results.

Key findings

Things to celebrate – Our top scores

  • 94.7% of people said that they knew who to contact if they had a concern about their care and 82.2% of these people felt that this person organises their care well
  • 85.1% of people felt they were treated with respect and dignity by our services
  • 79.8% of people felt that Talking Therapies were explained to them in a way they could understand
  • 78.7% of people felt that they were involved in making decision about themselves

Areas to improve – Our lowest scores

  • 23% of people said that they had been asked to give their views about the quality of their care in the last 12 months
  • 39% of people had been given information from mental health services about where to find help with finanical advice and benefits
  • 46.1% of people had been given support with finding or keeping in work (voluntary or paid)
  • 46.2% of people had been provided with support for their physical health needs

Actions to help improve on our lowest scores

  • We will ensure that service users and carers can tell us what they think about our services at anytime, by introducing a new feedback measure called Have Your Say
  • We will provide our staff members with information sheets so that they are able to signpost service users to receive effective financial help and advice

In relation to the results received for supporting people to access or keep in work and providing support for physical health issues, this support was compromised for the whole population during the period of the survey due to the pandemic.

We are currently refreshing our Community Services Strategic plans and the information from this survey will be used to help us think about how we improve our services for the future.

The full results to the survey can be found online.