Joint Southwark & Lambeth MH Carers forum August 2020
Welcome to the august update of the Joint Lambeth & Southwark MH carers forum. This forum is run online due to covid-19 restrictions. The forum is aimed at those who are caring for someone with a mental illness. It is important carers understand what the mental health, health and local authority services has set aside for them and their loved ones.
For the month of August we were delighted to have John Lavelle the service director for Lambeth mental health services. We were also joined by Lee Roach who is the Head Occupational Therapist for Lambeth. In attendance were the carer members from both Southwark & Lambeth, Healthwatch Southwark and the chair of trustee’s from Southwark Carers.
The maim talking point for the August meeting was the Lambeth Hospital consultation. John spoke about how they want to improve the quality of the inpatient wards so that they can meet the most basic needs of the clients/patients. John stated that SLaM are committed to supporting people who are in distress because of their mental illness, they have an opportunity to build a new purpose, new mental health unit and SLaM are planning around how can they can make the service sustainable essentially for the future. I could certainly say most if not all members agreed with what John said.
It is well known that there has been number of periods of consultation for 12 weeks between March and May 2020. In the presentation to the forum from John, there were 2 options. Option 1 being that nothing is done about the state of Lambeth hospital or Option 2 where SLaM looks to relocate 4 acute wards and the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) to a new purpose-built facility on the Maudsley site, Denmark Hill.
There was another option to develop a new facility on the existing Lambeth Hospital site, but it failed to meet 2 key affordability tests.
These were that the option required additional capital of between £30 million and £35 million due to additonal infrastructure and loss of capital receipts, coupled with a need to decant at least one ward to the Bethlem and another to the Maudsley, causing significan disruption.
So eventually planning permission was granted in January 2020 by Southwark Council to replace the existing vacant Douglas Bennett House facility on the Maudsley Hospital site. It was also mentioned in John’s presentation that Service Users, Clinicians and Carers from a number of boroughs attended workshops to help shape the design so that a service user voice was present from the beginning of the design process.
The facility includes 72 acute beds for Lambeth patients across four 18 bedded wards. The wards will be single gender, compliant with modern standards and ventilated with direct unsupervised access to outside space. The facility will also include a Psychiatric intensive care unit and a rehabilitation ward designed to support the needs of these services.
Lastly two national specialist wards, neuropsychiatry and eating disorders will be transferred from the Bethlem Royal Hospital.
The carer forum were then showed their first visual of what one of the rooms would look like.
John Lavelle mentioned the mock ups are designed to give a with an idea what we think the rooms would look like. It is based on the drawings of that the architects came up with so the forum saw then would be things like flooring, textures and colors and even then those things might change.
John showed us what the dining space consisted of. He explained in the dining space there are two gentlemen sitting through the window and to the left is that kind of living space as you will see in the top left hand corner, one of our wards, current dining room on the London hospital site.
The carers forum were shown some figures in where
There were 235 responses regarding the consultation
48 people participated in focus groups and public event
148 responses in the online survey
24 people then also commented on facebook
171,189 were reached through the facebook adverts
12 email responses regarding the consultation
One thing noted was even though SLaM had the intention to have some face to face meetings, they ended up having to move everything to virtual because of the COVID-19 issues. There also was a focus on making sure new services would target hard to reach communities especially those from BAME background who often would feel they were being let down or having to miss out on services.
Of the response to the proposals with about 84 % of responses were being being in favor of the change. Plus of that 64% were positive in the move of the wards to Maudsley.
SLam also did a specific work with a black male group around the consultation, and I found that there needs to be some further work to do around culturally appropriate inpatient clinical offer.
A good example was that one member of that particular group mentioned that the ward looks great, but actually, it’s what happens within that Ward is most important. So John mentioned in regards to BAME communities that maybe we arent getting it right for the moment. There is still a lot of work to do.
There will be a piece of work that is going to start in September, which is going to be supported by black thrive, which then will have SLaM think about what their offer is to black men as an example, when they are using patient services. This is work in progress, but SLaM are committed to that as part of the feedback from the consultation process.
John mentioned that they will be analyzing that the data that they got back done by the trust or by the CCG. And it’s just a bit of worth reminder that the consultation was actually a CCG consultation, because they are the people that ask slam on their behalf to provide the services to Lambeth. So the CCG led on the consultation and now SLaM’s healthcare consulting team is going to do the consultation and they have produced a report on the Lambeth’s Together website.
At the end of the presentation I stated it was an excellent presentation and it always helps when you’re describing something that seems really complex. This is one of the reasons for this forum is to get carers in the community and those who’s going to be affected by those changes to get at least an idea and get a chance to ask queries or comments or even compliments if you think this is something that’s really needed
Questions from the forum members
First to ask queries where representatives from Healthwatch Southwark.
Healthwatch felt it was really interesting to see and wondered if SLaM had like a Lamberth versus Southwark resident breakdown, because they were a bit concerned that maybe less people from Southwark had been heard from because the presentation was kind of titled as like improving services for Lambeth.
Another interesting query was on how wide the consultation going to be? as in numbers wide. A carer queried on is it just the local community because the impression they got from the report is its the local community. Plus it’s a Lambeth hospital and it should go to the whole Lambeth and and what does it now offer to the whole of Lambeth rather than the local area. The carer felt that it seems to present sort of housing project and, and and who’s going to administer that, for instance, who’s going to have The freehold at that particular site?
One other carer stated they came across the survey document in May, but they wasn’t aware then that the there was no provision being made for the Leo Ward and the early onset for psychosis Ward that is currently at Lambeth hospital. They felt according to the one of the therapists from the Leo community mental health team, which has been caring for the person they are looking after. That ward was the only early onset ward in the whole of the country.
The carer felt the ward was fit for purpose when their ‘loved one’ was there and the ward had an en suite bathroom. It was basic, but it was fine. It had an outside exercise area, and it was all on ground level. There was a separate male and female words with communal are. There were separate rooms for visitors to explore and visitors to meet a family members the carer felt that her ‘cared for’ had a good experience in that ward.
We also had another carer talk about their daughters experiences in those wards. The carers daugher did not go into Leo Ward and still the Carer did agree with what was said Leo was a good word. As the carer felt it gave both communal areas and it gave privacy for people as well and they had access to outside to meet each other in for games. The carer concluded that access to outside is important, and they don’t think that can be really possible in the tower block. On the other hand the carer agreed that the other wards are not fit for purpose at all. They’re dreadful!!
I mentioned it was good to hear that there is a push towards engaging the black community, particularly in the sense that certain things are just not quite getting there. I asked John that although he mentioned Black Thrive, I have noticed they are quite active in Lambeth. I continued to state that I’m not sure who’s the lead or use the contact for black thrive in Southwark, so I wondered who is contact overall regarding consultation under black thrive, be good to get their perspective in this forum.
Some contacts were mentioned, but also there might be at some point an opportunity for somebody to come and talk to us about the race equality framework standards that piece of work which essentially, is about assessing SLaM against some standards that have been set nationally.
Southwark Healthwatch mentioned in response to another carer’s concern about a blog they did. They had a previous presentation about the kind of safety of the ward and the architecture where someone asked a question, kind of related to what the carer was concerned about, which is shown below.
John finished up saying that they do have a communications and engagement group that was originally set up to think about the consultation processes and what material they might want to use and who they needs to engage with as part of the consultation processes.
SLaM are moving on the journey of the new build and providing samples and giving sign off really soon. So they will continue to think about how they can keep engaging with our communities in understanding what’s happening with the new build and what they are doing around whether it’s working with black men or whatever the different possibilities. SLam are going to keep engagement for the next few years.
Lambeth Lead for Occupational therapy presents
Lee Roach has been busy and presented a set of initatives regarding carers. Lee admitted that they have a particular challenge in the patient information system. Especially on recording information about carers.
So what they have decided to do in Lambeth is focus one week initially on carers as a is focused week. Lamberth are undertaking a number of different events during that week.
Lee thanked one of the carer members who’s agreed to come and talk to a couple of teams about her experiences as a carer.
When Lee was thinking about what what to do for those carer events, he really felt personally that the biggest impact on himself as a clinician is hearing the kind of narratives of people that his worked with and that usually has the biggest impact in terms of people reflecting on what they’re doing and so changing their practice. So in terms of hearing the experience of a carer, Lee think that’s quite an effective way of actually impacting change.
What Lee want to see as a result of the week’s events is a greater awareness of the resources that are available to carers that staff can refer people onto. Lee also wants to run a greater awareness of some of the resources that our staff can show carers on the wards. There also has been sign off of that they want more carers involved in the involvement register.
Breakdown of events
Lee spoke about the plan of the carer focused events. Where a carer agreed to talk to the to one of their teams on Monday so that’s the low intensity treatment team about her experience.
They are currently working across two sites. While they are working across a number of sites the majority the mental health teams are working on two sites. There will be another carer who will be talking to the team there about her experience on Tuesday afternoon.
The inpatient Lamberth inpatient care his group will meet virtually that started two weeks ago. Where they had 12 people attend that group. One of one of whom was was attending from another country. On Wednesday afternoon Lee is hosting a roundtable talk with possible Lambeth CCG, carers and Lambeth healthwatch. Then on thursday is the Leo ward community carers group. Then on Friday they are launching the ward lockers project from one of the involved carers who has been active inputting ideas.
This concludes the update for the August Joint Southwark & Lambeth MH carers forum. The September forum will have Kings College hospital feeding back updates on their Mental Health strategy.
