Southern Health opens six new mental health beds

Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust has opened six new beds in Southampton in response to a national shortage of beds for young people who need mental health care in a low secure setting.

Working with NHS England, the Trust has provided the beds to help alleviate the situation which all too often sees children and young people having to travel far for specialist mental health care.

The Trust has opened the additional beds within Bluebird House at Tatchbury Mount, Calmore. New staff have also been recruited to help support this group of patients.

The young people the service will target have mental and neuro-developmental disorders which pose a significant even of harm either to themselves or others and/or display challenging behaviour, self-harm and vulnerability.

Mayura Deshpande, clinical services director, said: “There is currently a well-documented shortage, nationally, of low secure mental health beds for adolescents. As a result, we were recently approached to provide new beds as an urgent measure to address this. I’m proud to say that our team responded to the request at pace and we have been able to open the beds within a very short time frame due to the hard work of my clinical colleagues.

“As a Trust, we have considerable expertise in treating young people with complex presentations. Young people admitted to our new low secure service will get the best possible treatment, education and rehabilitation. In addition, the new beds will significantly increase the availability of highly specialist care for children across the south. The work forms part of our longer term plans, working with NHS England to further increase the capacity of these highly specialised services for children across the country – with a particular focus on being able to support more people from Hampshire within the county.”