Charity calls for rethink on delivering community mental health care.

The way mental health care is delivered in the community needs to be radically rethought.

This is the message sent by charity Rethink Mental Health in their response to the NHS Long Term Plan. The charity has called on providers to look beyond traditional treatment settings and to deliver more services in the community.

The report emphasises that although diagnosis and treatment are vital, they are only part of the story. There is a need for more support for service users around housing, work and other needs; this is too often unavailable.

Mental health charity MIND estimates that 1 in 4 people in the UK report experiencing a common mental health problem such as anxiety of depression every year. Out of this group 1 in 8 are currently receiving some form of treatment, usually medication.

Support services in the community for people living with mental illness have, the RETHINK report says, ‘been overlooked for decades in policy and practice’.

The charity are communities and organisations, including the NHS, to work together to provide a ‘world leading holistic and integrated model of care’ that is widely available to users.

RETHINK believe this can be done by focussing on issues such as reducing waiting times, social prescribing and better communication between clinical support teams and other agencies including local authorities and the DWP.

The report recognises the improvements that have been made in access to psychological therapy through the NHS and calls on ‘wider society’ to ‘match the NHS’s commitment to do things differently’.

Adding that the publication of the NHS Long Term Plan is a ‘once in a generation opportunity to ensure people most affected by mental illness get the support they need’.

Speaking at the launch of the report RETHINK chief executive Mark Winstanley told Mental Health Today that it is ‘all too easy to fall into the trap of believing’ that diagnosis and treatment are the end of a journey that requires a much wider social response.

He went on to say that he hoped the launch of this report would be ‘the first step’ towards bringing experts and service users ‘together to work towards a common goal’.

‘Care in the community’ has become a by-word for sometimes well meaning, other times less so, neglect. Either that or a cynical ploy to close services under the disguise of freeing patients from grim Victorian asylums.

That narrative now redundant, most of those buildings were either bulldozed or turned into expensive apartments a quarter of a century ago. Is it time then to look again at care in the community?

The answer is a cautious affirmative, the third sector has been delivering it effectively on a shoestring for years. There must though remain a significant caveat around funding, the current government has an unfortunate track record of promising investment then failing to deliver.