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Posted on 14 Aug 2015

Nottinghamshire Healthcare is working with partners across the local health community and local authorities to transform urgent and emergency care in South Nottinghamshire.

The Trust is part of the South Nottinghamshire System Resilience Group (SRG), which was recently announced by NHS England as one of eight new ‘vanguards' transforming urgent and emergency care across the Country.

The vanguards are tasked with changing the way in which all organisations work together to provide care in a more joined-up way for patients and break down boundaries between physical and mental health. The eight vanguards join the other vanguards and benefit from a programme of support and investment from central transformation funding.

In South Nottinghamshire the work will focus on three areas; one of which is Mental Health:

• Enhancing mental health services in the community to give patients the care they need, in the best place at the right time, first time.
• Improving access, clinical assessment and treatment to primary care clinicians at the ‘front door' of the emergency department at Queen's Medical Centre so that patients are assessed and then followed up closer to home.
• Enabling more direct clinician-to-clinician conversations in Nottingham University Hospitals so that more patients are directed to the right service, first time, every time.

Dr Chris Schofield, Consultant, Nottinghamshire Healthcare explained: “The mental health component of the vanguard is a very ambitious piece of work focused on improving patient care for mental health in an emergency and urgent situations. We want to ensure that all services work together as smoothly as possible to look after the patient in a streamlined way. For example, if a patient requires urgent mental healthcare and this need isn't dealt with quick enough, it becomes an emergency. That person may end up in the emergency department in crisis, which is not necessarily the best place for them. So we are bringing together 111 services, mental health crisis teams, acute liaison psychiatry, community mental health teams to work together to see a patient with the right service, in the right place, at the right time, first time, every time.

“Our aim is to improve the services available for all patients with urgent and emergency mental health needs, whether they are already receiving care, or for individuals who become unwell for the first time. This covers all ages, from children and adolescents to older people. Ensuring that patients and citizens know, or can easily find out, where to get urgent and emergency mental health help in the right place, at the right time, first time, every time.”  

Other specific pieces of work in the programme will include a focus on 111 mental health services, liaison psychiatry and looking at how to reduce delayed transfer of care by improving supported discharges.

This is a multi-agency project with input from health providers, commissioners, emergency services and the local authorities, and builds on the elements already recognised locally and nationally as working well in Nottinghamshire under the crisis care concordat such as the Street Triage service, Mental Health 111 national pilot, the Department of Psychological Medicine and our 24/7 consultant led crisis resolution home treatment services.  It will also draw on the experience of how mental health services were able to help ease the pressures on the emergency department last winter. 

Other local partners in the SRG includes Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, Nottingham City Clinical Commissioning Group, the South Nottingham and Erewash clinical commissioning groups, Nottingham City and County Councils, East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS ), Nottingham CityCare Partnership, Derbyshire Health United Ltd (111 provider), Nottingham Emergency Services (GP out of hours), Health Watch Nottingham and Health Watch Nottinghamshire.