Better Care to support our adult patients towards recovery
Work to improve the care and experience of our adult patients and support our communities to live well and stay well is picking up pace.
Our Better Care Programme works with both acute and urgent care and our community services together to improve the lives of our adult patients and tackle the mental healthcare challenges seen across our system.
Currently, a greater number of people are accessing our services in crisis with more complex needs. As a result, many patients are staying in inpatient care for longer, with more people waiting for social care support after their treatment.
Some people are waiting longer than they should to receive the care they need in different settings, from A&E to in the community. And those who need inpatient care are sometimes cared for too far away from their friends and family.
We know that this is not what our patients want or need. Hospital stays which are longer than needed can lead to delays in a patient’s recovery and prevent other people who need urgent inpatient care from receiving it.
To address these challenges, we are working on better ways to support our patients to avoid crisis, and make the care we provide more purposeful, timely, less restrictive and more recovery-focused.
We are also improving our delivery of clear, consistent clinical practice. We are using better digital tools to help us to deliver care and support patients to access services.
We are working on how we listen to our patients, service users and their families and carers, as well as each other, so people don’t have to tell us the same story more than once. And we are ensuring the work supports our Trust to reduce health inequalities and become an anti-racist organisation.
Leading this work is Dr Billy Boland, Chief Medical Officer of South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust, who said: “This is a really vital piece of work to ensure that the way we work with our adult patients, service users and carers, sees us being really clear on the plans we make with each person on what we hope to achieve with their care.
"We also need to work with our service users on how we can avoid them becoming more unwell, have robust plans in case they do, and on what each person’s recovery looks like – as well as improving the quality of care and experience everyone has.
“Working closely with and listening carefully to our patients and carers, as well as our clinicians, is at the heart of this.”
Key to this work is collaboration with people with lived experience of mental ill health, as well as our clinical colleagues working together across both community and acute services.
One of the Trust’s Lived Experience Members, who has been a service user at the Trust and is involved in this work, said:
“I think involving people with lived experience of mental health will bring insight and a different perspective to this work. When I was asked if I wanted to be involved, I thought it was a great initiative and something I really wanted to be a part of – looking to improve the experience service users have by putting them first.”
Areas of work include improving care planning, crisis and discharge planning, as well as addressing the reasons behind why some patients stay longer in hospital than is needed. This will support more people to get the right care, at the right time in the right place, giving our patients and service users the best chance of recovery.
