Better Communities: Find out more about our work to improve local mental health services
Through our Better Communities programme, our Trust is working to improve care and environments across South West London to help create an NHS fit for the future.
Two key enabling programmes, Better Environments and Better Care, will continue to transform our services and our facilities over the next three years through significant investment in our teams and our estate.
Across these innovations we are working to reduce the stigma around mental ill health to create inclusive services that aim to be actively anti-racist.
We are determined to address entrenched health inequalities and ensure service users experience fairness equality of access, treatment and outcomes. All together this work is helping us to deliver the best possible clinical services, that empower people with mental health conditions live well and stay well – the right care, at the right time, in the right place.
Learn more about the programme in our new guide
Better Environments
New investment is helping us to transform our environments to create modern healthcare facilities that will serve residents across Wandsworth, Richmond, Kingston, Sutton and Merton for generations to come.
Over a number of years, we have worked hand-in-hand with our patients, carers, services users, staff and the wider community to design two centres of excellence for inpatient care and alongside new and refurbished outpatient centres.
Our journey began with the £150m transformation of Springfield Hospital and the development of ‘Springfield Village’. This saw the creation of the new Trinity and Shaftesbury buildings and the opening of a new stigma-breaking community at the heart of Wandsworth.
Springfield Village includes hundreds of new homes, a public square, shops, a gym and a brand new 32-acre park.
In early 2025 works will begin on the £11m redevelopment of the Barnes Hospital site in Richmond, and a refurbished outpatient centre will open at the site of the former Richmond Royal Hospital.
At the same time the £110m redevelopment of Tolworth Hospital in Kingston will commence – all together representing a near-£280m investment to transform our ageing estate.
Better Care
In its first phase, our Better Care programme focused on transforming adult mental health services to support people to get help early, recover, and stay well in the community, closer to their friends and families.
In each of the boroughs we serve we have collaborated with local partners to offer a wider range of therapies and treatments, physical health care, peer and carer support and advice and support with housing, employment, finances and social welfare.
As a result, our community mental health teams have become new 'Integrated Recovery Hubs' to help people get better access to a wide range of support including:
- Tailored mental health care and treatment, which is more recovery-focused and with an emphasis on evidence-based therapy
- Working with 22 different organisations across the five boroughs, such as Citizen’s Advice and Mind providing peer support, and advice about housing, employment, finances and social welfare
- Ensuring our GP partners can get specialist advice and guidance on care and treatment for service users
Our Better Care Programme also 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.
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.
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.
Better Care also covers transformations across both Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and Specialist services — you can find out more about this work in our new programme guide.
