You may recall that the network sent out a questionnaire in early 2017 to explore your thoughts about creating a Single point of Access for Mental Health Crisis referrals for people who are not known to a CMHT. The proposal was to create a combined Home Treatment and Crisis Team that would offer a 7 day a week service covering 9am-9pm. This would have provided 2 practitioners on duty 7 days a week covering the City for those referrals.
Since that time Livewell have been constantly advertising the vacant posts (6 full time mental health practitioners), whilst there have been a lot of ‘views’ on NHS jobs and a number of interviews set up they have not managed to recruit into these positions. As of today there is 0.6 practitioners who have been recruited.
The position is that we have not been able to operationalize a single point of contact/referral for professionals in the form of a Home Treatment and Crisis Team.
It is not fully understood why these particular roles have not been attractive to suitable candidates, one hypothesis is that a combined team approach is off-putting to those people who are interested in crisis work and not in Home Treatment or in a 24/7 model.
Livewell SW proposes to move away from the combined Home Treatment and Crisis model approach and to develop a standalone SPA for mental health crisis assessment. The service would offer longer opening hours than a traditional CMHT. It is hoped by developing a standalone service that this may be more attractive to potential suitable candidates. Can you please take 5 minutes of your time to respond to this quick questionnaire about the change in direction that is proposed?
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