Health Innovation North West Coast is delivering the national Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme (MHSIP) in the North West Coast, commissioned by NHS England and NHS Improvement as part of the Patient Safety Strategy. It aims to support mental health trusts to test and scale interventions designed to improve safety in inpatient settings.
Reducing Restrictive Practice
This programme builds on the work of the Reducing Restrictive Practice Collaborative, hosted by the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health.
We will scale up and spread the reducing restrictive practice theory of change and change package, developed for the Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme by the Reducing Restrictive Practice Collaborative.
We are aiming for a 25 per cent reduction in incidence of restrictive practice in all inpatient mental health, learning disabilities and autism wards engaged in the programme by September 2023.
Restrictive practices cause both physical and psychological harm to patients and are often traumatising to an already vulnerable patient group. The use of restrictive practice can impact negatively on staff who either use restrictive interventions on patients or who witness them.
Wards with high levels of restrictive practices often have unstable staff groups heavily supported by agency staff, with difficulties recruiting and retaining staff. They can be difficult places for both patients and staff, which is counterproductive to building the trusting relationships between staff and patients that are fundamental to safe, high quality mental health care.
There is large variation in rates of restrictive practice and a marked inequality in race, diagnosis, age and sex. The CQC’s 2017 State of Care review of mental health and learning disability services observe and report this large variation in practice, and the Department of Health and Social Care’s Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act 2018 statutory guidance reports that there is still work to do.
National AHSN Network programmes
Early Intervention Eating Disorders
This programme is supporting mental health teams across the North West Coast to speed up the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders in young people aged between 16 and 25.
This programme aims to achieve earlier intervention and treatment of eating disorders in young people, a reduction in the time a young person is untreated for their eating disorder, a reduction in waiting times as well as admissions to hospital and lastly reducing the use of healthcare services resulting in cost savings.
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London developed a model called FREED (First episode Rapid Early intervention for Eating Disorders). This care package is aimed at overcoming barriers to early treatment and recovery.
To find out more about the programme visit the national AHSN Network programme page.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
We are working with mental health trusts and community paediatric services across the region to improve the ADHD assessment offer to children and young people by implementing a computer based objective assessment tool (measuring attention, impulsivity and activity) to supplement current clinical assessment processes.
This tool aims to increase the speed and accuracy of diagnosing ADHD as well as improving the experience for patients, their families and also clinicians.
East Midlands AHSN supported a 12-month, real-world demonstrator project, where an objective assessment tool (QbTest) was used in different pathways across three East Midlands NHS trusts.
To find out about the results from this project, for more information on the programme and to watch an introductory video, visit the national AHSN Network programme page.
