value for money

Let’s be kinder about obesity

Fat-shaming is a recent phenomenon. People who do it include doctors, NHS managers, politicians, journalists, comedians and ordinary folk like you and me. I write as one who has done it as well as had it done to me.

I always liked the beach

I always liked the beach

Here’s me as a baby. Fully breastfed, I was bigger than my tiny mother almost before I could walk. I take after my father. I am robust. I love my food.

Humans are built for survival. Some are wiry and can run fast for long distances. Others have staying power. In an emergency situation, chunky people like me can cope with cold and hunger because we can survive on our fat stores. We are the polar bears and the Arctic seals of the human race.

Our modern Western world has played havoc with these survival characteristics. As long as you have money, food is plentiful. But the least nutritious, most fattening sorts of food are often the cheapest. And the combination of sugar, fat and salt in many processed foods such as cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice-cream, crisps, milkshakes and even bread is, apparently, addictive.

This Ted Talk is enlightening. It helped me understand why losing weight is so hard. When you have gained weight, your body quickly adapts to being bigger, and adjusts your metabolism accordingly. Resetting the metabolic rate is extremely difficult. Once you have lost weight, you will probably have to eat fewer calories for the rest of your life to maintain your reduced size, even with regular, vigorous exercise. So you are fighting not only an addiction, but also your own nature.

And there is another factor. Many modern medications, particularly those used to treat various sorts of mental illness, have the unfortunate side effect of increasing one’s appetite. People taking them find they feel hungry all the time, and not surprisingly they eat more. I finished my antidepressants six months ago. Yet I have at least half a stone to shift, and despite extensive motivation and knowledge, it is proving a struggle. I know from chatting to others how distressing it is to gain four or five stone very quickly, with all the disability and stigma that goes with being overweight to add to the burden of the mental illness for which you have to keep taking the medication that leads to the weight gain.

I know people who have been to the doctor and been encouraged to lose weight. And then they go to the shop next door to buy a newspaper and are told that if they also buy a cheap monster size bar of chocolate (which contains more calories than they need to eat in a whole day but no protein, vitamins or roughage) the newspaper will be free. If this were cigarettes or drugs, we would be horrified.

Given the cost to the NHS of obesity, with its links to heart disease, strokes, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, arthritis and other long-term disabling conditions, not to mention depression, anxiety and agoraphobia associated with body image and self worth, you would think that investing in prevention and effective treatments for obesity would be the place to start.

I don’t like the term obesity epidemic. Obesity isn’t catching. Nonetheless, 60% of us in the UK are now either overweight or clinically obese.

There is mention of this in the NHS Five Year Forward View. But until this week, there has been no systematic appraisal of the best ways to help people achieve and maintain a healthy weight, nor a coordinated, evidence-based commissioning approach to weight-loss and healthy weight maintenance services. Public Health England have produced a report about sugar, but we have just learned that it has been withheld.

Who knows what the real story behind this is? I don’t really care. I just know that leaving obesity to individuals to tackle is unfair, ineffective and helps no-one but those who sell us all that stuff we don’t need.

Our current attitude to obesity is bizarre. Let’s tackle the food giants who push processed junk food at us from every direction. Let’s publish the public health report into sugar and do the economic appraisal that will prove beyond all doubt that helping people rather than criticising and lecturing them would in the end save a lot of money and even more unhappiness.

And most of all, let’s stop blaming people for doing what comes naturally.

This is an update on a blog I wrote earlier this year. I’m reprising it because of the fuss this week about Public Health England’s report into obesity and the Prime Minister’s apparent refusal to consider a possible tax on sugar.

 

If I ruled the world…

In a previous life, I ran a mental health trust for 13 years. It was really hard, but it brought some influence to bear on something that matters very much, i.e. the experiences of 1:4 people, who, like me, are sometimes mentally ill.

In 2010, as Chair of the Mental Health Network, I shared a platform with Health Minister Paul Burstow, Paul Jenkins, then of Rethink, Sarah Brennan of Young Minds and others at the launch of the coalition government’s mental health strategy No Health Without Mental Health. In 2013, I met Norman Lamb (who took over the ministerial role in 2012) and a few other senior colleagues to discuss why it was that the strategy hadn’t completely worked, in our opinion. The shocking evidence of widespread disinvestment in mental health services was by then becoming clearer, rigorously uncovered by investigative journalists Shaun Lintern (HSJ), Andy McNicholl (Community Care) and Michael Buchanan (BBC). Who are heroes in my opinion.

In times of plenty, mental health services have received at least a small share of extra resources available. Professor Louis Appleby’s excellent National Service Framework was delivered from 1999 – 2009 through increased investment in crisis services, early intervention and assertive outreach teams. And it was strictly monitored. Commissioners and/or trusts who thought they knew better than the best evidence of what underpinned compassionate, effective care for people with serious mental illness were found out and given no option but to improve. The architecture that did this monitoring has since been dismantled. We are left with regulation, inspection, adverse incident reporting and stories in the media.

The pressure by local commissioners on providers to swallow the current disinvestment medicine is considerable. Mental health leaders who make a fuss are viewed as lacking loyalty to their local health system. Were the same cuts made to cancer or heart services,  there would be national uproar.

This tells us something, which is that stigma towards the mentally ill is alive and kicking within the NHS.

A true story: the other day, I mentioned the wonderful Alison Millar’s Kids in Crisis  programme to someone senior from NHS England. I could tell they were irritated to be reminded that very sick children are currently languishing in police cells or being shipped hundreds of miles around the country while desperate clinicians spend hours trying to find a bed. This person actually said that parents are prepared to travel all over the world looking for the best treatment for conditions such as cancer. So why should CAMHS be different? When I reminded them that this wasn’t about highly specialist care, just access to care anywhere, they blamed the failure on local services and moved on to share their insights with someone else.

So we have denial about the impact of disinvestment, as well stigma. And I realise that in my new freelance world, I have a different sort of influence.

Thanks to Paul Jenkins, now CE of the Tavistock and Portman Trust, for his blog this week on the paucity of investment in mental health research. Another example of how stigma is flourishing towards those least able to argue for resources. And to Andy McNicholl for his piece on the bed crisis in adult mental health services, mainly caused because people are being hospitalised when other services have closed, or there is nowhere safe for them to go when they are ready for discharge.

Regarding the NHS Five Year Forward View (5YFV) here’s my 6-point plan for making mental health more mainstream. With measurements. Because if you don’t measure, you can’t manage.

1. Suicide prevention

Make suicide prevention the business of every citizen of the UK. Stop blaming mental health trusts and their staff for failing to keep people alive. The responsibility is much broader than that. Locate suicide reduction planning with Health and Wellbeing Boards. Make it their number one priority, with proper support as well as sanctions for lack of progress.

2. Mental health within the NHS

Expect every provider and commissioner to make the care of people who happen to experience mental illness their explicit business. Start with primary care. Require every NHS employee, including reception staff and everyone who works in a commissioning organisation, to do a minimum 1/2 day training, with an annual update, delivered by experts by experience. Report on compliance via the annual NHS staff survey.

3. Integration

Require local systems to produce integrated commissioning plans for all primary and secondary services. Particularly crisis care; dementia; all major physical conditions such as heart disease, strokes, obesity, diabetes and cancer; neurological conditions such as MS and MND; and musculo-skeketal conditions including chronic pain. Draw on the RAID model for measurement. Allow organisational form to flower according to local need. But also require investment in integrated services through an annual reduction in organisational overheads, and increased investment in the third sector.

4. Public health

Reduce premature death rates in people with serious mental illnesses of up to 25 years by making mental health promotion core business for primary care and secondary health providers in the statutory and non-statutory sectors. Target supportive, evidence based obesity reduction, smoking cessation, substance misuse harm reduction and exercise programmes for people with diagnoses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, PTSD and personality disorder. Set ambitious targets over the next 25 years and monitor hard against them to help turn around the life chances of some of the most marginalised people in society.

5. Making the business case

It is up to the NHS to articulate and prove the business case for a change of approach in welfare for people with long term conditions such as serious mental illnesses. Commission the best brains eg Professor Martin Knapp at LSE to put the evidence together. Which is that it is considerably more costly as well as more cruel to condemn people who experience mental illness to poor, insecure housing and limited, insecure income, and for them to appear frequently and often pointlessly within criminal justice services.

But these costs do not occur in one place. Creating exciting opportunities for engagement and volunteering such as The Dragon Cafe can help people move from being recipients to full participants. Placing employment specialists within mental health teams and incentivising pathways into work are also proven to be highly successful. The alternative, i.e. penalising those in need of help, is counter-productive. It forces people to have to make themselves appear less able, makes them reticent about coming off benefits for fear of never getting them back should they need them in the future, as well as being extremely detrimental to their long-term well-being.

6. Research and improvement

Shine a light on why so little is spent on mental health research, given the financial and life chance costs of mental illness. Do something serious ang longlasting to reverse this. And then measure the impact longditudinally. No-one says we’re spending too much on cancer research, do they? Use that as our benchmark.

AND listen to the eminent and brilliant Professor Don Berwick, who makes the point that inspection never improved any health system. We need to invest in improvement science, architecture and skills for the whole NHS, of which mental health is an intrinsic, integrated part. Calling something NHS Improvement doesn’t necessarily make it an improvement body, by the way. But it is a good start.

 

I’ve shared these thoughts with the fabulous Paul Farmer, CE of Mind, who is leading one of three national task forces set up to help deliver the NHS England 5YFV. The other two are on cancer and maternity care. I know he wants to do the best he can. But he needs your help.

If you are part of the mental health family, and I would argue that every human being should be, please join in. Let’s seriously increase our ambition for those of us who experience mental illness, and focus hard on a small number of really important things that will really change lives. And then let’s concentrate and not squabble amongst ourselves as we set about achieving them.

That’s how winning teams win, against all the odds.

What goes on at conference doesn’t stay at conference

This week, NHS folk (patients, policy makers, clinicians, managers) gather in Liverpool for the NHS Confederation Conference. I’ve been to quite a few in my time. Here are my tips for getting the most from this annual NHS jamboree.

  1. Treat the event like a great art gallery or music festival. Don’t try to see and do everything. Be choosy, and give the things you choose your undivided attention.
  2. Travel with an open mind. Be prepared to learn new things and to unlearn old ones. If you only seek out sessions or speakers that you think will confirm your views, you will waste your time and the money of whoever has paid for you to go.
  3. Some people need no encouragement to network. But if you aren’t confident about bounding up to Simon Stevens or Jeremy Hunt with an outstretched paw, don’t worry. Practice by saying hullo to people who look like you feel – perhaps a bit lost or lonely. And remember what Dale Carnegie said: You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in you.
  4. When meeting new people, try to be neither boastful, facetious or enigmatic. If they ask you what you do, tell them. Self deprecation is good, but only if you mean it.
  5. Dress for comfort AND style. These are not mutually exclusive. And ladies, remember that hobbling about in heels that may be causing you permanent disability is not a good look.
  6. Don’t be a killjoy. If you get invited, go to the conference dinner. This is where you will get to mingle with very senior people once the pudding has been served. I’m expecting some serious selfie action from NHS management trainee chums.
  7. Burn the midnight oil if you must. But never forget you are at work. Even if someone makes you an offer you feel you cannot refuse, say No. What goes on at conference does NOT stay at conference.
  8. Take breaks. Go for a walk. Have a rest in your room. Do shopping or emails or visit Tate Liverpool or watch triathletes training in the dock. Drink coffee. But stay focussed on why you are there. The NHS is in desperate need of radical change. We are relying on people like you to work out the two or three things that will make the most difference, and then to deliver them. So you need to be in good shape.
  9. Be kind. You may see folk who you know are having a hard time. Please don’t avoid them. Some of us older hands worry that, despite all the talk about compassion, the NHS has become less compassionate, with considerable focus on inspection, compliance and performance but insufficient attention to recovery, development and improvement. And we have jettisoned most of the architecture that helped senior people to step aside with dignity when circumstances required this. The best you can do is say hullo to people working in very tough places, and listen if they seem angry or frightened. You never know, one day, this could be you.
  10. Bring back stories. I remember one year Roy Lilley started his session with the sound of an unanswered phone ringing while he did a voiceover about being a worried relative. He went on to demonstrate an inadequate vacuum cleaner, dropped it off the front of the stage, introduced us to a new bagless vacuum cleaner, and brought on then little-known James Dyson to chat about quality. He ended with a duet with his brother on keyboards. It was fabulous. This year I highly recommend Alison Cameron at 9.30 on Friday morning. I will be watching online as she reminds confetence why we all do what we do.

You can prepare by following some great NHS people on Twitter. I’ve already mentioned @allyc375. Here’s a few more: @WhoseShoes, @NHSConfed_RobW, @NHSE_Danny, @ChrisCEOHopson, @Saffron_Policy, @HPIAndyCowper, @Crouchendtiger7, @HSJEditor, @SamanthaJNHS, @antonytiernan, @anna_babic, @DrBruceKeogh, @JaneMCummings, @helenbevan, @jackielynton, @DrUmeshPrabhu, @JamesTitcombe, @NHS_Dean, @KarenLynas2012, @yvonnecoghill1, @2020Health, @Damian_Roland, @BCHBoss, @nickyruneckles, @paulfarmermind, @KMiddletonCSP. Of course there are many more wonderful NHS folk on Twitter, but the ones on this list are definitely at the conference this year. Please seek them out and say hi, and send best wishes from me. And expect a warm welcome back.

I recommend that you follow the conference chair @tweeter_anita. I hope she will mention her stunning new book Sophia, the biography of a forgotten Indian Princess who became a suffragette. It has reminded me that keeping quiet and toeing the line never got anything important done. And causes me to wonder how it can be that in 2015, with NHS staff being 70% women and 20% BME, Anita was left to interview 6 white men who are, collectively, in charge of NHS commissioning, public health, regulation and training. I’m not criticising the incumbents, just the system that perpetuates this shocking lack of diversity at the top. All the more reason to dig deep and support the statue Mary Seacole, which will commemorate not only Mary, but all women and BME people who have dedicated their lives to caring for the sick and wounded.

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Please support the Mary Seacole statue appeal http://wp.me/P4ZnZz-3Y

So listen hard, make some noise, have fun and be kind. I hope you have a wonderful conference.

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With thanks to @MarkAxcell for the lovely poster.

 

When I’m 94…(to the tune of When I’m 64 by the Beatles)

When the NHS was created in 1948, 64 was considered elderly. Both my grandfathers died during the 1940s aged 50 from what we now know to have been smoking related illnesses, having served in the WW1 trenches. My maternal grandmother died aged 65. My other grandma managed to last a bit longer; she died in December 1982 aged 79. 3 out of 4 died in their own beds at home.

I was born in 1955, a child of the NHS. I have worked in it since aged 18. The NHS was set up to improve the extremely poor health of the nation after World War 2, with clinics providing advice and free milk, vitamins, orange juice and cod liver oil, as well as weighing and measuring children, hearing and eye tests, free dentistry, and checking for lice, nits, scabies and rickets. A mass free screening and vaccination programme began for common killer diseases such as smallpox, diptheria, tetanus, polio and TB. Going to the clinic with my mother and younger brothers was fascinating and memorable. Providing care free at the point of delivery to people who were sick or injured was a massive bonus for the public, but its wasn’t intended to be the main aim of the new NHS.

Despite these wonderful founding principles, the NHS quickly began to increase its focus on treating sickness. The status of hospital medicine has always been greater than public health or primary care; this continues today. Radical health promotion initiatives such as the Peckham Experiment sadly closed down before they had a chance to prove themselves.

I trained as a health visitor in 1978, having been inspired during my hospital nurse training – in 1975 I went out for the day with the local health visitor. As well as admiring her cream Morris Traveller and adorable spaniel puppy, I will never forget one visit. In a tiny cottage in a village outside Cambridge, we called on an elderly lady. I remembered her in hospital after a massive stroke, lying with her face turned to the wall. Back home, despite needing two sticks and very limited speech, she ushered us into her cosy kitchen, all smiles, and made us tea and biscuits while her cat snoozed on the sunny windowsill.

Community services (those outside hospital that either help people to stay healthy or look after them at home when they are ill or dying) and mental health services have always been the Cinderellas of the NHS. Never more so than in the last few years, when they have experienced unprecedented cuts in order for commissioners to continue to pay for increasingly sophisticated physical hospital interventions.

Today I have a lovely gig: joining 100 or so folk from the NHS and social care system in Kent, Surrey and Sussex, all of whom want to improve care for older people. It is organised by the KSS Academic Health Science Network. Life expectancy in Kent, Surrey and Sussex is the highest in the UK. Were it not for pockets of significant deprivation along the Kent and Sussex coast, and the appalling fact that people with serious mental illness live 20 years less than the population average (25 years less than the KSS average), it would be even higher. It is common for acute hospital wards to be entirely populated by people in their mid 90s and above. The people attending the event know things have to change. Medicalising old age is cruel as well as extremely costly.

It is, fortuitously, Dementia Awareness Week and Dying Matters Awareness Week. I know from the research of my brilliant ex-colleague Professor Sube Banerjee that only 18% of people who have dementia only have dementia. The majority have between 2 and 7 other significant health conditions that seriously affect their lives. The way we run the NHS is simply not serving their needs, despite very elderly people being its majority users. I also know from the wonderful work of organisations such Dying Matters that these days, most people die in hospital despite very much preferring to be cared for at home.

Today, we will be encouraging the people at the event to face this enormous challenge together. We have to do things differently. It says so in the Five Year Forward View. The attendees at this event are to some extent, like those involved in the vanguard sites across the country, the converted. But even they will have to throw away beloved ideas and think the unthinkable.

I am indebted to @HannahTizard on Twitter for this lovely infographic about tall poppies.
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Tall poppies may experience meanness from others because they are full of ideas and are not afraid to challenge the status quo. They are always thinking about how to do things better and are not prepared to accept mediocrity, especially when it harms others.

I will be using this lovely infographic today to encourage the people at the event, who I think of already as tall poppies, and giving them a link to this blog so they have a reference to keep.

I hope you find it helpful too. Please be a tall poppy; challenge the status quo if you think the care you provide or commission isn’t what you think you would want yourself when you are 94 or even older.  And do something right now to start making things better for every elderly person who wants fewer tubes up their bottom and down their throat, and more time to enjoy their latter days with somebody kind to sit with them, help them to have a drink and hold their hand.

Meanwhile, as I intend to live until at least 94, I’m off to read Sod 70! by the indomitable Dr Muir Gray, to help me continue to treat my body hard but well, and How to Age by Anne Karpf, from the School of Life series, to help me manage my (sometimes fragile) psyche and approach old age with equanimity and joy.

Do please join me.

Post script: 11 hours after posting this, I’ve already had lots of feedback. One person feels I’m generalising and that the research quoted doesn’t support my view that older people would prefer to avoid unnecessary investigations. I agree that we must ask people and really listen carefully to their answer before subjecting them to invasive tests. Over 100 seem to like it so far.

I’ve also realised that I’ve been channelling the #HulloOurAimIs campaign from NHS Change Day led by my lovely Twitter and real life chum Alex Silverstein @AlexYLDiabetes. So I wanted to mention it. Alex is the tallest of poppies and despite being less than half my age, has taught me loads. Go Alex and thank you xxx

 

 

Dear New Secretary of State for Health

Congratulations on helping to form a rainbow coalition government so quickly, and for your appointment. It is wonderful that a Conservative/Green/LibDem/Labour/National Health Action (delete as appropriate) MP is prepared to set aside political differences and take responsibility for the NHS in England on behalf of us all. What could be more important?

I expect you will get a few suggestions on what to do first. I thought I’d make it easy and send you my list at the earliest opportunity. It contains 5 things.

  1. Pass an Act of Parliament that makes it illegal for any politician to use the NHS as a political football. This will allow you to make plans with all the coalition partners that transcend the short – sightedness of a 5 year parliamentary term. And if it puts the Daily Mail out of business, it will be have the added benefit of improving the nation’s mental well-being.
  2. Appoint a group of well-informed independent thinkers to form your ministerial team. A few suggestions: Dr Sarah Wollaston, Norman Lamb, Dr Caroline Lucas, Liz Kendall, Dr Clive Peedell. They will help you remember the difference between the role of elected members – to set overall strategy and oversee governance – and of professional clinicians and managers, whose job it is to advise on how best to achieve your aims safely and then deliver them for you. Don’t be tempted to get  involved in professional matters such as numbers of hospitals and staff, or specific clinical policies. The most important job for you and your team is the give the experts room to work and keep politics with a big P out of it while they do.
  3. When fighting for the money needed from the Treasury to stabilise and transform the NHS and meet health needs today and for generations to come, think what Nye Bevan would have done if he had been told it couldn’t be afforded. Then do that.
  4. Do what you must to sort out the mess that means that 7 people now do the job of one civil servant who used to run the NHS, and ties the hands of politicians like yourself in bureaucratic loops. Remove the tyranny of competition for competition’s sake. But don’t do a wholesale reorganisation. It is the way we provide NHS services that needs to change, not arcane aspects of structure.
  5. Dump the phrase “parity of esteem”. It has lost all credibility. Instead, allocate funding on the basis of disease burden and the cost of not offering treatment based on the best evidence at the earliest opportunity. This way, children and young people’s mental health services will jump from the bottom of the priority pile to the top, with mental health services for adults of all ages coming a close second. If anyone complains, point out these three facts:
  • Psychosis is like cancer. The earlier it is diagnosed and treated, the better the prognosis and the least likely it is to recur. The same is true for all serious mental illnesses.
  • 75% of mental illnesses start before the age of 18. Like my depression
  • People with serious mental illness die on average 20 years earlier than the rest of the population. From suicide, yes, but more frequently from heart disease, strokes, cancer and the complications of Type 2 diabetes. Putting mental illness first will save money and lives, and make those lives worth living.

The results of the 2015 election show that the public are fed up with media-savvy politicians who speak in sound-bites and put their own interests and those of their well-connected friends before the needs of ordinary people. But it will take us a while to relearn that honourable politicians sometimes make mistakes, that most mistakes only come to light with the benefit of hindsight, and that even the best decisions don’t invariably deliver the expected results. Being a public servant has never been harder. Please take care of yourself; we need you to remain compassionate, committed and to keep telling it to us like it is.

With loving kindness,

Lisa

 

 

Sometimes it’s good to feel angry

One effect of antidepressants is to knock the top and bottom from one’s emotional range. After dark weeks of despair, self-loathing and nothingness of my most recent depression, I welcomed this. It was a relief to feel calm, even blunted.

Now I’m on a reducing dose of medication, I notice a gradual return to a more responsive emotional state. I’m more joyful, sometimes a little more anxious. And I find myself getting angry again about things that matter to me.

Actually, I felt angry today.

While it’s great that NHS England and the government recognise the need to invest in children and young people’s mental health services (CAMHs), why has it taken so long to find this out? And why is investment an election manifesto promise, rather than simply the right thing to do for our young people?

I have two interests I should declare.

  1. I ran such services for 20 years, including 13 as a chief executive.

  2. I first saw a psychiatrist myself aged 15.

The current system isn’t working. But we need to understand how we reached this position, or we risk not improving things far enough, even at all.

CAMHs staff are, almost without exception, amazing people. They don’t look after one patient at a time. They deal with the complications of whole families. They have extraordinary skills, vocation, patience and perseverance plus bucket loads of compassion. But across the country, many are fed up with being blamed for failing children and young people. Because they aren’t failing them. We all are.

The current “commissioning” arrangements could not have been more badly designed unless they were intended to be poor value and counter-productive. It is unacceptable that the different “Tiers” of care are purchased by unrelated parts of the so-called “system”. And that when children fall between the gaps, it is the clinical staff and their employers who face the blame.

Local authorities are under even greater financial challenge than the NHS. Many have made massive cuts to the first line, lower tiers of these services, or made them even harder to access than the higher, NHS tiers. Yet their members sit, by statute, in judgement of the NHS through Health Overview and Scrutiny Committees. Watch me and colleagues participating in this arrangement at Kent County Council a year ago, during which time one councillor publicly suggested that commissioners had set up the trust and staff I then led to fail.

Commissioners of such services have in many cases not been given the chance to argue for increases in resources, or even to defend the services they commission from cuts. Some have even felt the need to assert that providers were exaggerating the now-proven, substantial national increase in referrals. The causes are multi-faceted.

In many unrelated parts of England, services are inundated and can’t cope. Crises occur daily and children wait in police cells to be assessed by hard – pressed clinicians who know there are no beds available anywhere in the country even if the child is in desperate need of admission.

3 useful facts:

  •  Anorexia isn’t a young person’s lifestyle choice. It is a serious mental illness that, without effective treatment, carries a 30% mortality rate.
  •  Psychosis is like cancer. The earlier it is diagnosed and treated, the better your prognosis and the least likely it is to recur. The same is true for most other serious mental illnesses.
  •  75% of mental illnesses start before the age of 18. Like my depression

My 8-point plan for NHS England

  1. Do not ask management consultants or experts in commissioning to design solutions. Ask the people who know. The ones who work in and run these services
  2. Stop setting organisations against each other by competitive tendering. This may be OK when you have time, but with this, you don’t.
  3. Commission one local statutory organisation in each area under the greatest pressure to be the system leader for all aspects of CAMHs except secure care, with commissioners working within the local system. Avoid competition challenges by declaring an emergency, setting targets for engagement with CCGs and GPs, and requiring the lower tiers to be expanded and provided outside the NHS, either directly by schools and/or the not-for-profit sector. Do this for long enough to allow things to settle and thrive, ie a minimum of five years.
  4. Don’t allow anything to cloud your judgement. It isn’t social care good, NHS care bad. Or vice versa. CAMHs teams should be multi-disciplinary and multi-agency. Parents and children don’t care who staff work for. What they care about is getting help that is responsive and effective.
  5. Carefully consider secure services for children and young people. Are they good value? Clinically effective? Compassionate? Safe? And are children in these services only because there are insufficient non-secure services? Only national commissioners can do this.
  6. Work as hard with the next government for increased funding for CAMHs as you would for heart disease or cancer care, were these services in an equally challenged state.
  7. Celebrate the amazing staff who do this work. Encourage ministers, the media, CCGs, trusts, schools and the third sector to do the same.
  8. Imagine what you would want for your children, were they suicidal, self-harming or hearing voices.

What could matter more?