Service User Involvement in Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust: Rhetoric and Reality
Last week saw Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust [MMH&SCT} under the attention of the media for once again failing to give Manchester an A1 mental health service, despite spending huge amounts of public money in the attempt . The article entitled (Service User Involvement in Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust: Rhetoric and Reality….) was wrote three years ago this month. Yet the article wrote by a service user and a member of the respected Asylum Collective; tells very much the truth about what has been happening over the last three years to a demoralised staff and patients who needs are not being met and many are being discharged (stepped down as the Trust likes to say) to their GP’s, often when they are not ready to be discharged. Manchester City Council Health & Scrutiny Committee should read the article to fully appreciate that the closure of the commissioned state of the art PFI built Edale Unit, has caused massive shortages in beds leading to spiraling out of control cost which have rendered the Trust no longer viable and a merger perhaps with another Manchester Trust being instigated. Here is where the article starts:-
Recently I came across an article by the Head of Patient Experience in Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust (MMHSCT) published in the Health Service Journal. The article is dated 22 November 2012 and is entitled ‘Building patient engagement from the ground up‘.
The Head of Patient Experience says: ‘We [MMHSCT] had the best scores for treating people with respect and dignity (9.7 out of 10), making people feel listened to (9.3), and taking service user views into account (9.0).The Trust also received the highest national scores in helping people to achieve their goals, making sure people know what to do in a crisis and supporting people with mental health problems to address their physical health needs’.
This is what I (somebody who uses services in MMHSCT) say: ‘In Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust, inpatient and community adult mental health services are currently being ‘reviewed’ and re-structured.
With regard to inpatient services, one of the adult inpatient wards (Edale House in the MRI in central Manchester) closed in spite of the strong and longstanding opposition expressed by service users, carers,and staff alike. The decision to close Edale House was clearly based on cost, given that the Trust was apparently not keen on continuing to pay rent for the ward premises. All patients from Edale House have been transferred to Park House, an inpatient facility in North Manchester General Hospital (in north Manchester), where the Trust owns the land and thus there is no payment of rent involved. Now that Edale House has become unavailable, people living in central or south Manchester are likely to find visiting relatives and friends admitted to Park House, in north Manchester, particularly difficult and off-putting given the increased amount of travelling involved. In addition, I understand that there are few individual rooms in Park House – at least that was the case back in 2009 when I was detained there. So, now that Edale House has become unavailable, people admitted to Park House are faced with the dormitory situation which can be very frightening and exposing, raising serious issues of lack of privacy and dignity – it was actually really traumatising for me. Finally, when I was detained in Park House in north Manchester, I lived in central Manchester; this meant that using my Section 17 Leave (6 hours per day at some point) in a meaningful way was a real challenge given that for instance it used to take me over 2 hours to go home from Park House on public transport. So, now that Edale House has become unavailable, people living in central or south Manchester and detained in Park House are likely to be hindered from using their leave (their only glimpse of freedom and autonomy within an everyday reality defined by compulsion) in a meaningful way due to the excess travelling involved.
With regard to community services, the existing 11 Community Mental Health Teams in the Trust are expected to shrink to 6, which means workers will have bigger case-loads and less time for meaningful interaction with service users; there will be loss of staff (we have been told this will amount to 46 people but this is not certain); workers (including people with care co-ordination responsibilities) know that the nature of their jobs will change but they do not know exactly how, and they have been in this insecure state of not knowing for over a year now; service users are told that all this change will improve services and make them more ‘targeted’ but there is only general, vague talk and no specifics. There are fears among service users that people will be discharged from hospital into the community without the appropriate support from Community Mental Health Teams. Last, service users are treated as ‘recovered’ and being discharged from Community Mental Health Teams whereas they are not ready for discharge and would undoubtedly benefit from ongoing support from Community Mental Health Team staff. All this paints a picture of funding cuts and drastic change that have given rise to a great deal of insecurity and uncertainty amongst workers and service users alike; Community Mental Health Team staff characterise all this as ‘disheartening‘; the Trust claims that the changes in adult mental health services are not determined by cost but that they are going to save a couple of million pounds nevertheless!’
Service User Involvement in Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust: Rhetoric and Reality….
Patrick Cahoon In His Own Words “We had the best scores for treating people with respect and dignity”
Credit: “Service User Involvement in Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust: Rhetoric and Reality” First appeared in November 2012 in the Asylum Magazine ‘Dina’s Blog’
Additional Reporting and Photographs By MUNReporter
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Asylum the quarterly not-for-profit publication Inspired by the Democratic Psychiatry movement in Italy known as the Italian experience: at which Alan Hartman our current vice chair and one of the founding members of Manchester User’s Network attended Italy as a patient in the nineteen eights copies of the magazine will be on sale from MUN.
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