NICE publish dementia commissioning guide: practical advice for commissioners

NICE have published a new guide to help commissioners provide evidence-based care for people with dementia. Providing care for our ageing population seems not to have been out of the news in recent years and rightly so, especially as the headline stories are frequently not positive. A recent Care Quality [read the full story...]

Healthcare commissioning for people with long-term conditions: new report from the Nuffield Trust

What do healthcare commissioners actually do? Ask a hundred people who work in the NHS and you’ll probably get a hundred different answers. The landscape is moving quickly as we approach the April changeover, and with management budgets getting cut, it’s an increasingly challenging area to work in. This new [read the full story...]

Are you making the most of your National Elf Service?

It’s not all about the Mental Elf you know. There are lots of other elves who spend every waking hour scurrying around to find reliable evidence to help you. There are now seven magnificent elf websites and one more due to launch very soon.  Here’s a quick run down of [read the full story...]

More guides to help GPs commission mental health services

A year ago I blogged about the new mental health commissioning guides that the Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health (JCP-MH) had published for GPs. The JCP-MH is a collaboration between public sector organisations, charities and professional bodies. Their aim is to “inspire commissioners to improve mental health and wellbeing, [read the full story...]

Mind publish report to help mental health commissioners improve crisis care services

Mind have published a number of resources aimed at improving mental health crisis care, which they say is ‘under-resourced, understaffed and overstreched’. The charity have used Freedom of Information requests to obtain data from mental health trusts, have conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 patients and are also involved in [read the full story...]

NICE recommends an integrated approach for the care of people with drug use disorders

NICE have published a new quality standard aimed at supporting the recovery for adults with drug use disorders, including opioids, cannabis, stimulants and other drugs. This set of documents on drug use disorders now sits beside the existing NICE quality standards on dementia, depression in adults, alcohol dependence and service [read the full story...]

A joined-up solution for social inclusion and mental health recovery: new briefing from the Centre for Mental Health

Recovery is an increasingly popular concept and philosophy in mental health circles and rightly so. Many of us who have direct experience of suffering from a mental health condition extol the virtues of an educational self management approach that helps individuals to take responsibility for themselves.  This kind of approach [read the full story...]

Understanding the mental health marketplace in England: new briefing from the NHS Confederation

This new briefing paper from the NHS Confederation provides a clear overview of the mental health marketplace in England. Over £7 billion was invested in adult and older people mental health services in 2010/11. Most providers of services are statutory organisations, but there are also many charities, companies and social enterprises [read the full story...]

New briefings to help develop better local mental health services

A partnership of leading mental health charities has launched a series of briefings to help develop better local mental health services. Following the publication of the implementation framework for the Government’s mental health strategy, these briefings set out the steps that local authorities and NHS commissioning groups can take to [read the full story...]

New research to guide commissioning of Independent Mental Health Advocacy

Independent Mental Health Advocates (IMHAs) help patients who are under the Mental Health Act to understanding the position they are in, look after their rights and make the right decisions about their care and treatment. Independent advocacy has been around for many years, but there have been very few evaluations [read the full story...]

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