Spring 2019 News Flash
Our Transition to CIO
When the original Birmingham mental health consortium (BMHC) was established, the plan was always that the company would be registered as a charity. This work was never undertaken, at the time and, in the meantime, the Charity commission has clarified the types of activities that charities can and cannot undertake. When, in 2015, the board attempted to register the consortium, with its original articles, as a charity, the Charity commission rejected this twice.
In 2018 the board was advised, by solicitors, to establish a new charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) and transfer the membership from the consortium to the new charitable company. At the same time, they recommended that a trading subsidiary be established so that the commissioned activity could be managed and governed by the subsidiary whilst the CIO could become a focus for addressing some of the larger challenges in mental health in Birmingham and the West Midlands. Living Well UK CIO was formally launched at an extraordinary general meeting in December 2018. At the same time the living well consortium was converted into a wholly owned subsidiary of the member organisation, living well UK CIO.
The consortium board continues to focus on building the capacity of third sector organisations to deliver the contracted activity and broadening the geographic coverage of the consortium’s activities across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands.
The new CIO has started work on four key development areas, bringing in members who are not currently active in the IAPT contracts as well as some who are. The working groups have met, a number of times, and are developing work plans to enable consortium members to prove the effectiveness of alternative approaches to delivering support to those in need of improved mental health.
We have recently written to all members of the previous mental health consortium asking them to transfer their membership to the new CIO. Whilst many have done this, we are still awaiting a number to reply to Harvinder. If you are still thinking about this, you will see from the newsletter that there is much to get involved in with the consortium and the CIO and we would encourage you to transfer your membership or at least talk to Harvinder about your concerns.
The Year in Review
Training Programmes for the next 12 months are now available for all our members. We have invested around over £20k on programmes to improve service delivery and provide member organisations with up to date skills to deliver a service with optimum care and best outcome.
Over the last 12 months, NHS England has tightened the standards for delivery organisations, contracted to deliver Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). The NHS publication, The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Manual, published in June 2018, spells out the new national standards and the recognised training and accreditation, approved by Health Education England. The majority of this year’s training and development budget will be spent ensuring that all provider members and those aspiring to become providers are able to meet the standards and remain contract compliant.
We currently have 11 IAPT trainees across the consortium. The CCG paid for 3 posts but LWC subsidised the 6 places. We have supported another 2 trainees in IAPT training. We are looking at supporting another 10 IAPT trainees in 2019/2020 cohort. This will provide the much-needed staff to meet future demand in IAPT delivery in line with meeting the 25% prevalence by 2020.
In Summary; last year we closed the year with 8 IAPT graduates in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy High Intensity (CBT HI) and Psychological Wellbeing Work (PWP) through our member-organisations leading to jobs working within the Consortium
In addition, compulsory training has been set to tackle Knife Crime.
The current situation in the city around knife crime comes amid growing public concern about the rising levels of young people carrying knives and how this is now tipping into fatalities. Alongside the national panic about suicide amongst Young People.
The fact that we carry lots of young people in our treatment system; We want to make sure we are ahead of managing risks and ensuring all providers staff delivering on FTB are both skilled on challenging and dealing with these issues appropriately.
Our plan is to put on a series of action learning sets that we make compulsory for staff delivering on the contracts to attend training programmes starting May 2019
Future Plans
The phase 2 of the training programme for providers will include how to skill them up to deliver high-quality IAPT, risk management, and assessment, safeguarding, more IAPT qualifications such as DIT, IPT, EMDR and Counselling for Depression.
Upcoming
Worcester Triage
Meet our team
Worcester Triage UPDATE!
Living Well Consortium undertook the Worcester Health Minds triage in July 2018, starting off with a 4 month pilot, the trajectory during the first two quarters was at 550 attended appointments per month, however we were unable to reach that, this was due to underestimating staffing initially only having 7 members of staff, referrals being allocated out of house which caused confusion and other mitigating factors, however month on month we were tackling this and expanding and thus growing our numbers.
To tackle the issues we faced, we took on the Administrative side of things, managing referrals coming into the service via phone, email and letters. Thus, employing an additional 3 members of staff as well as appointing an administrative manager.
During quarter 3 our staff members rose to 15 practitioner staff as well as having an additional 3 bank staff, and thus we were able to deliver 636 clinics in the month of March an increase of 214 from when we started the service, with the likelihood of April being our highest month.
15 practitioners’ staff, seeking one more
3 Admin staff, seeking one more
3 managers
Attended appointments Month breakdown
Express your interest in joining
Future Investment Programmes for Members Only
NON -IAPT DELIVERY
SCHOOLS & WORK OFFER
SOCIAL PRESCRIBING OFFER
CRISES CARE PROGRAMME
For more information contact: INVESTMENT GROUPS
Other news
Living Well UK working with Omnia MDT
We are involved in a new way of providing mental health support to patients in the East Birmingham Area. You can find out more about this service here:
Proud sponsors of City Drive 2019
Birmingham City Drive is a week of events, co-ordinated by iSE (Initiative for Social Entrepreneurs), designed to showcase the fantastic work social enterprises are doing across the City.
Each year through Birmingham City Drive the aim is to encourage more people to:
- Buy from social enterprises
- Work for social enterprises
- Volunteer for social enterprises
- Invest in social enterprises
- Start social enterprises
A quick peek into this year’s Events
Great Connections| Social Enterprise Festival
We will be launching a platform where we invite all our members to share all the great work they are involved in, watch this space for more development and co-production opportunities.
Working together to develop mental health and wellbeing in our community.