Work on transforming mental health community services in Gloucestershire continues, with a large amount of activity taking place to restructure and rearrange teams within Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust.
We also continue to work closely with Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) partners, including Inclusion Gloucestershire, to enhance support for people across our communities. Our latest updates include:
- On the 30 January 2025, Inclusion Gloucestershire in partnership with GHC held an assessment workshop to gather views from Experts by Experience on their experience of the assessment process. It was a valuable opportunity for colleagues to directly hear this feedback and following their write up, we look forward to sharing it more widely. We’re developing a new referral form for core community mental health services that starts the discussion around what is important to people and their goals at an earlier stage.
- The Locality Community Partnerships continue to run weekly meetings across the county and have now supported over 800 people with accessing services. These partnerships bring together various organisations to provide better coordinated care.
- Gloucestershire is one of the best performing teams in the Southwest for Annual Physical Health Checks (APHC) of people with Serious Mental Illness. Currently 86% of eligible people have completed or been offered a health check. We are working towards additional resource to focus on follow up appointments, offer smoking cessation support, link in with GPs, multi disciplinary teams and locality regarding interventions. We’re also looking into ways to make it easier for GPs to receive APHC information and act on the results.
- The OATS (Open Access Therapeutic Support) Service, launched on February 19, 2024, has shown promising results after its first year of operation. This is a service co-delivered with Kingfisher Treasure Seekers. OATS offers peer therapy for people who experience overwhelming emotions, facilitated by a specialist team who are supervised weekly by the Lead Psychologist, adhering to therapeutic community principles. It was designated to be trauma informed, co-produced with lived experience and to fill the gap for those struggling to access other mental health support. Key findings include:
- 149 members enrolled, with 51 attending regularly
- Early data suggests reductions in GP visits (30%) and crisis team contacts (70%) for regular attendees
- Positive feedback from members, highlighting feelings of safety, understanding, and reduced isolation
Read more about the background to Community Mental Health Transformation here: Community Mental Health Transformation (CMHT) > Glos Health & Care NHS Foundation Trust
