Community mental health services survey 2019 – our results

This week, the Care Quality Commission published the results of a survey about our community mental health services.

253 service users completed the Care Quality Commission’s survey, carried out in 2019. On the whole, we scored on par with other Trusts on the vast majority of questions. However, we saw a slight dip in our overall performance when compared to our results from 2018.

Many service users report that they do not feel they have seen services enough for their needs – this has worsened since last year. Many did not feel as involved as they wanted to be in deciding which therapies to use, and the percentage of service users who know who to contact out of office hours if they have a crisis has decreased since 2018.

On a positive note, our score for how well service users’ care is organised has improved and, this year, service users feel more involved in making decisions about their care in review meetings.

You can read the full report here.

The survey was carried out between February and April 2019, at a time when our staff and service users experienced change and upheaval as part of the community mental health services redesign.

It’s likely that this had some impact on the survey results, and it’s worth adding that the redesign was carried out to address some of the issues that are highlighted in the report.

Key findings

What we’re already doing to improve our community services

In spring 2019, we carried out the community service redesign. There are some core principles that underpin this work:

• We build meaningful relationships with service users to create a partnership
• We invest time in the initial assessment to make sure we understand our service users’ needs fully
• We use this understanding and work in partnership with service users to develop a care plan that is authentic and achievable
• We support service users by working as multi-disciplinary teams, including integrated psychological support

We’ve evaluated the impact of the redesign on transfers of care, you can read our evaluation report on how service users felt about this here. We’ve also carried out surveys and focus groups with service users to help us continue to improve care and results will be published soon.