NHS England announces six mental health pilot sites

NHS England has announced six new pilot sites for mental health across the UK, to push forward the design of new approaches to delivering services for children and young people.

The sites will aim to reduce psychiatric hospital admissions and time spend in hospital, in a bid to drastically reduce the number of adults and young people travelling miles away from home in order to receive treatment.

This kind of out of area placement makes it difficult for families of patients to visit, which can further affect a person’s recovery and can lead to fragmented care and increased lengths of stay.

The pilot sites, made up of NHS mental health trusts, independent sector and charitable organisations will work together, sharing a local budget, to effectively reorganise services in their area.  

Two of the six pilot sites will step up the level of crisis care available in the community for children and young people to prevent them from needing to be admitted to hospital, freeing up local hospital beds.    

The remaining four sites will look at re-locating people in secure mental health services closer to home as well as addressing their surrounding social care needs so they can leave inpatient care and re-integrate into the community as quickly as possible.

The six pilot sites include: West Midlands - Birmingham and Solihull; South London Partnership - Oxleas NHS FT; Thames Valley and Wessex - Oxford Health FT; South West - Devon Partnership NHS Trust; West London - West London NHS Trust; and North East and North Yorkshire - Tees, Esk and Wear Valley FT.

Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s national director for Mental Health, said: “This marks another step in implementing the Mental Health Five Year Forward View. Today’s action will help ensure that patients are treated as close to home as possible, and help reduce the need to send some of our most vulnerable people miles across the country to receive vital treatment.”