Health and Wellbeing Board	6^th January 2021
Report of the Independent Chair of the Mental Health Partnership

Report of the Independent Chair of the York Health and Wellbeing Board’s Mental Health Partnership

Summary

1. This report presents the Health and Wellbeing Board with an update on the work the partnership has undertaken since last reporting to the board in September 2019.

2. The board are asked to ratify the amended Terms of Reference for the partnership and indicate their continued support for the partnership’s direction of travel.

3. The Independent chair of the partnership will be in attendance at the meeting to present this report.

Background

4. The joint health and wellbeing strategy for 2017-22 identifies four principal themes to be addressed.  One of these themes is mental health and wellbeing with the key priority for that theme being ‘to get better at spotting the early signs of mental ill health and intervening early’.  Other aims in the joint health and wellbeing strategy in relation to mental health are:

Ø Focus on recovery and rehabilitation

Ø Improve services for young mothers, children and young people

Ø Ensure that York becomes a Suicide Safer city

Ø Ensure that York is both a mental health and dementia-friendly environment

Ø Improve the services for those with learning disabilities (to be addressed in its own strategy)

5. These are expanded and explored in more detail in the Health and Wellbeing Board’s all age mental health strategy 2018-2023.

6. Additionally in 2019 the Health and Wellbeing Board undertook a mid-way review of the joint health and wellbeing strategy and identified that the following priority should be their focus for mental health for the rest of the strategy’s lifetime:

The board will promote awareness and understanding of the protective factors that support good mental wellbeing and ensure that compassionate, strength-based approaches in communities are developed.

7. This was communicated to the Mental Health Partnership who were heartened to see that it was a perfect fit to the holistic approach to the delivery of the mental health priorities they had been taking.

Independent Chair’s Update

8. This update aims to illustrate how the partnership is continuing to work in an all-inclusive way to shift the focus from hospital based services to a more community focused model of service provision. It gives a flavour of the transformational change needed to achieve our long term vision of embedding a Trieste style model of mental health care in York.

9. Tackling some of the fundamental things such as transforming how we deliver services and ensuring that the human rights of all individuals are met within that service provision are long term pieces of work. Similarly engagement with everybody who has a voice about mental health in the city will take time. However over the last two years progress has been made with the Multiple Complex Needs network which has started to shape how they can influence system change in the city. As part of this transformation we need to understand that some of the work may increase demand for services and this will need to be managed.

10. Additionally new challenges and pressures have emerged for mental health and wellbeing due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

11. Despite the current pressures on the health and social care system and a halt in being able to meet for a few months we have still been able to drive a number of our key work streams forward. The two I would like to highlight with you are the Northern Quarter Project (NQP) and our bid for Community Mental Health Transformation Funding.

12. This project started in 2019 with mapping the community assets in this area of the city and has grown significantly since then. An engagement event was held in February 2020 which was very well attended and received.

13. We have chosen to start in the northern quarter of the city because there is already a wealth of community assets running along the ‘corridor’ from Haxby, through New Earswick, and into the city centre. These include the Folk Hall, the new Foss Park hospital, The Hut, 30 Clarence Street/The Haven, York St John University Mental Health Clinic and Converge, and York Explore. The area is also well served by a number of ‘community connector’ roles such as Local Area Coordinators and Ways to Wellbeing Workers. In working with local people and communities we hope to be able to build on these strengths, and better connect people to these and other such assets in the area.

14. The following are a few key achievements of the NQP over the last few months:

· Multi agency working group established

· NQP local engagement event held at York St John in February 2020, attended by 100 delegates where we started to collectively map the community assets that exist within each ward and across the Northern Quarter as a whole.

· Work streams established with leads from across partner agencies (see below).

· In September, the project was successful in gaining additional project management resource to support the various work-streams

· On 9th December we held a very successful NQP on-line engagement event attended again by around 100 delegates. We shared again the our vision for the Northern Quarter Project (NQP) and a community approach to mental health and wellbeing, updated everyone on work that has been done to date, and shared several powerful examples of personal stories where people have gained strength and support by connecting with others in their community

15. The NQP work streams include the following:

· Community conversations – skilling up members of the community such as shop keepers, community leaders, hairdressers, initially within the Clifton area, to encourage community based conversations to support mental health and wellbeing;

· Whole system data collection and analysis – to collate data held by a range of organisations in the City to give us a better understanding of the needs and allow us to measure the impact of any initiatives. We have recently used information from York Hospital, Adult Social Care and the Police to create ‘heat maps’ of the City which have allowed us to better target initiatives such as the community conversations work stream;

· Developing a more integrated, multi-disciplinary community MH service with the development of community mental health service ‘hubs’ including creating stronger links with GP practices

· Frontline practitioners network – bringing together practitioners and local community leaders and champions living and working in the North of the City to help to enhance the mapping of ‘assets’ and to build relationships and support better joint working.

16. In October, NHS England launched the Community mental health transformation funding which will see significant investment within mental health services. Timescales for developing proposals for this funding have been extremely tight, but the work of the NQP has meant that York has been well placed to develop a coherent proposal based on the principles of the Project as well as the specific priorities of the funding.

17. Applications are submitted on an Integrated Care System (ICS) level (Humber, Coast and Vale) so it has been a challenge to ensure that priorities for York are reflected within such a wide geographical footprint. Our initial proposal supported investment in the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, the development of a VCSE alliance model, a multi-agency hub model including specialist roles, coproduction workers, a peer support scheme, a system wide culture change programme and evaluation.

18. We await feedback from NHS England on the Humber Coast and Vale proposal and any further clarification on funding shares across the patch.

Terms of Reference

19. Since June 2020 we have been holding virtual meetings every two months which are well attended. However we plan to change the way we work starting in 2021 and move the focus to ‘doing’ at an operational level rather than our more formalized strategic meetings. To this effect we are suggesting to the Health and Wellbeing Board that we change our Terms of Reference (see Annex A). The key changes we propose are as follows:

Ø To revise our membership to better reflect who attends the partnership meetings

Ø To meet quarterly rather than every two months

Ø To continue to meet virtually to allow for maximum attendance

Ø To make more use of flexible sub groups and other existing groups in the city to drive work streams forward and to clarify the relationship of these groups to the partnership

Ø To reflect in the Terms of Reference that the partnership is committed to working in a co-productive and multi-agency way across the statutory and voluntary sector and with local residents.

Consultation

20. Consultation with a wide audience took place when developing both the joint health and wellbeing strategy and the mental health strategy. Co-production is at the heart of the Northern Quarter Project and various events and meetings have been held where all are invited to have their say. The partnership have recently established an engagement and co-production sub-group which is still in development but hopes to start meeting with a wide-range of interested parties involved to help design and develop future mental health services.

Options      

21. There are no specific options for the Health and Wellbeing Board but they are asked to

Ø Ratify the changes to the Terms of Reference at Annex A

Ø Indicate their ongoing support for the work being undertaken on the Northern Quarter Project and the application for Community Mental Health Transformation Funding

Implications

22. It is important that both the priorities around mental health and wellbeing in both the joint health and wellbeing strategy and the all age mental health strategy are delivered. The establishment of the Mental Health Partnership has enabled this to be achieved. There is a recognition that demand on services will significantly increase across all age groups and major change will be required to ensure that all agencies and partners work together in all sectors to meet this challenge.

Recommendations

23. The Health and Wellbeing Board are asked to

Ø Ratify the changes to the Terms of Reference at Annex A

Ø Indicate their ongoing support for the work being undertaken on the Northern Quarter Project and the application for Community Mental Health Transformation Funding

Reason: To give the Health and Wellbeing Board oversight of the work of the Mental Health Partnership and assurance in relation to strategy delivery.

Contact Details

Author:	Chief Officer Responsible for the report:
Tim Madgwick Independent Chair of the Mental Health Partnership	Tim Madgwick Independent Chair of the Mental Health Partnership
	Report Approved	✔	Date	15.12.2020
Specialist Implications Officer(s) None
Wards Affected:					All	ü
For further information please contact the author of the report

Background Papers:

None

Annexes

Annex A – Amended Terms of Reference