Community Mental Health Services survey 2020 – 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 their views about the support and care they receive from our Community Mental Health Teams.  On Tuesday 24 November, the CQC published our results.

We are pleased to announce that the majority of our results are placed in the intermediate 60% of all the 55 trusts and mental health providers surveyed and several of our results are in the top 20% range. It’s also encouraging to see that the majority of our scores have shown improvement from last year.

You can read the full report here.

330 service users took part in the 2020 survey (compared with 253 in 2019).  The survey was completed between February and June 2020. It’s important to acknowledge that the Covid-19 pandemic started during this period, which may have impacted on some of the results.

Areas where we scored above the 80% threshold, compared to other trusts:

  • Service users said that they had seen staff often enough and were given the time to discuss their needs, their treatment and share how their lives were affected by their mental ill health
  • People felt they got the help they needed when they contacted us
  • They could ask about their medication and what it was for
  • They were supported to find work or other activities to join in with
  • They felt they were treated with dignity and respect

However there are some things that service users said we are not doing so well, in comparison to other mental health trusts.

We scored in the bottom 20% of trusts nationally in the following areas:

  • Having a specific annual meeting to review care with service users themselves
  • Checking how service users are doing with their medication
  • Involving service users in deciding what therapies they would like to use
  • Supporting people with their physical health
  • Involving family or friends as much as the service user would like

So what now?

What will we do with the information from these results in order to improve our community services?

  • We will engage with our staff to gain their commitment to making changes and then ask them what they have done to improve their service in a “You Said – We Did” style of reporting. We will ask them to provide evidence to the Patient Experience and Involvement Strategic Steering Group to show improvements made.
  • We are already involving our service users and carers from the Working Age Adult Community Mental Health Service to help us to “re-set” this service by listening to their views and ideas.

If you would like to be involved in helping to improve our Community Mental Health Services, please contact the Patient Experience Team via email at patientexperience.lypft@nhs.net or by phoning them on 0113 855 6840 and they will provide you with details of the many ways in which you can be involved or give your feedback.