Mersey Care Stakeholder Update Newsletter
Welcome to the January edition of Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust’s New Monthly Stakeholder Update Newsletter
Big Brew reaches out to tackle stigma
Welcome to the January edition of Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust’s New Monthly Stakeholder Update Newsletter
Big Brew reaches out to tackle stigma
Mersey Care’s commitment to tackling the stigma associated with mental health was a focus of our bid to turn mid-January’s ‘Blue Monday’ into ‘Brew Monday’…
As part of our Big Brew campaign to encourage people to sit down over a brew, talk about their problems and break down the taboos around mental illness, Mersey Care took part in a range of awareness-raising events to coincide with what is regarded by many people as the lowest day of the year for their mood.
Big Brews took place from Sefton to South Liverpool including one at our social inclusion and Recovery College base at the Life Rooms in Walton, while two cafes in Bootle, the Kindfulness Café and North Perk, held long sessions and Lloyd’s Bank in Speke trained its staff in mental health awareness.
Many stakeholders took up a #brewfie challenge via social media to encourage others to do likewise and support the campaign. During the period around 143,000 people read the Big Brew messages, while Big Brew mentions across social media have increased by 16,200% over the past year.
You can find out how to add your support by looking at our #Brewfie Wall of Fame webpage
Mersey Care flu fighters
The importance of getting Mersey Care staff to have the flu jab to protect themselves and their patients has been a cornerstone of a great deal of work across our many services spread over a wide geographical area for successive winters.
Thanks to the hard work of a dedicated team, latest figures show that Mersey Care finished as the best performing mental health trust in the country by the end of November. The national target for each trust is 75% and we have exceeded that to reach a 77.82% uptake for the organisation.
These figures have been achieved by having 73 vaccinators across our geographic footprint whose responsibility it was to offer the vaccine to frontline staff and inpatients that were in the high risk health groups.
It will be a couple of months before the final national tables for each trust are announced but Mersey Care is determined to keep going. If it weren’t for this campaign, the many thousands of contacts our frontline staff have with patients and carers and the many contacts they, in turn, would have with other people, could easily help a deadly disease like flu spread very quickly.
Read more from Chief Executive Joe Rafferty in his online blog
What ‘Just Culture’ means to ‘Perfect Care’
Two years ago Mersey Care embarked on a journey towards ‘Perfect Care’ and what that meant in terms of organisational and operational changes and importantly a cultural shift.
As part of that process we have made significant progress against big goals for zero suicide for people in our care, the introduction of No Force First across our organisation and a focus on physical health and wellbeing for our service users, patients and staff.
For instance, by changing our work patterns we have shown that we can limit restraint even with the most complex of patients. And over the past year we have developed suicide prevention training for all staff, which is rapid, accessible, easy to complete and costs just £4 a head to implement. Well over 3,000 staff now have an awareness of suicide, both in the work environment as well as in their communities.
More than 300 clinicians have contributed powerful insights to help us truly understand the barriers that prevent us from operating in an open and transparent way that will help us achieve ‘perfect care.’ These insights will enable Mersey Care to work in different ways to understand a shift from the general blame culture adopted by our society to looking at ‘what’ is to blame rather than ‘who’.
In the run-up to Christmas we held a conference to explain ‘just culture’ including lessons learned from industries like airlines, nuclear technology, oil and exploration which exist in risk environments that needed radical rethink. We are exploring how Mersey Care can create an environment where we put an equal emphasis on accountability and learning to make fundamental improvements and shifts in the way we look at problems and solve them.
This is the start of what will be an on-going cultural change – read more about what one Clinical Leader makes of it all.
New Hospital for Southport
Mersey Care has been talking and listening to stakeholders with a view to repeating the success we had with our Clock View Hospital in Walton (opened 2015) by building new state-of-the-art hospitals in Southport and on the site of Mossley Hill Hospital.
Mersey Care recently held two public consultation events and one service user and carer event over proposals for a new mental health hospital in Southport.
The Southport redevelopment would be at our existing Boothroyd Unit and would integrate inpatient facilities with outpatient services and community teams on one site, replacing the Hesketh Centre, which was originally a Victorian hotel.
Nearly half of the people attending the consultations were local residents and members of the public. An overwhelming 90 per cent of all attendees supported the redevelopment proposals, and every one of those who attended found the Mersey Care staff and their construction partners helpful in providing information about the proposed new build.
Read more in Joe Rafferty’s blog (Link to come from this week’s blog)
Learning Disability Consultation
A long-awaited NHS England consultation into learning disability services has another month to run. Mersey Care will be responding formally because it directly affects our organisation, staff, service users and carers – specifically over the future of our Whalley site.
Mersey Care is committed to delivering the very best learning disability services, with the best clinical, therapeutic and expert staff in the most appropriate settings. There are various documents available which explain the consultation, including easy read versions of the consultation.
More information about the consultation and how stakeholders can have their say is online by clicking here.
Congratulations
Mersey Care’s Library and Knowledge service attained a 95% compliance rating with national standards. As part of the Trust’s Learning and Development Agreement with Health Education England, we are required to submit a self-assessment against national standards which is then verified by the Health Care Libraries Unit team. By gaining 95% it means they have maintained their green rating, the highest available.
Congratulations also to our No Force First team, who were shortlisted for the ‘Patients as Partners’ awards in the Supporting Individuals to Take Control of their Care category run by at the King’s Fund. We were the only mental health trust to be represented and head judge Lord Victor Adebowale, the CEO of Turning Point and Non-Executive Director of NHS England, said: “This is the first time I’ve seen an associated cost saving which could save millions and lives if rolled out across NHS.”
Further congratulations to Ashworth High Secure Hospital after they were shortlisted in two categories in the National Service Users Awards, in Recovery and Arts for making trophies and awards and the community/vocational project for the patient band. The Trust had two further entries shortlisted, with our Specialist Learning Disability Division base at Whalley in the running for the Community/Vocational Project for Safety in Town, where they face opposition from the Life Rooms in the same category.
MC Magazine
For more news and features see our latest Members’ Magazine. The latest edition of MC Magazine is now available digitally on the Trust website, which includes features on depression, Nordic walking and a photography exhibition highlighting the lives of people with dementia. There’s even a great feature on seasonal recipes for us all to try. Printed copies are also available should you like one please contact us, or you can view it online on our website
In the News…
Mersey Care was represented on a BBC TV news item about the postcode lottery of drug allocation on Merseyside on the Newsnight programme. It featured an excellent interview with Dr Yasir Abbasi, head of our Addictions service, view it on our YouTube channel.
See the Big Brew article in the Liverpool Echo
Feedback
Is there anything you would like to see in the future editions of our stakeholder news? Tell us what your special interest in Mersey Care is and how we can help keep you informed – simply ‘reply’ to this email.
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