FEATURE ARTICLES

Giving a keynote speech at Design in Mental Health 2018, NHS England’s national clinical director for Mental Health reported on progress made, and goals yet to be met, on mental health provision in England in line with the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health.

In an opening session at May’s DIMH 2018 conference, leads and members of the DIMHN workstreams outlined the goals of their workstream, and some of the ambitious and potentially far-reaching activities that each is undertaking.

This year’s Design in Mental Health Awards celebrated excellence in six categories, and saw an impassioned after-dinner speech by Dr Jacqui Dillon, an activist, writer, and speaker, who suffered childhood abuse, and now lectures worldwide on trauma, abuse, psychosis, dissociation, and healing.

Ensuring that staff using staff attack alarms are well trained, urging mental healthcare providers to better communicate with each other, and encouraging strengthening of guidance and standards.

Director of award-winning design and manufacturing company Safehinge Primera, Philip Ross, discusses Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust’s goals for a ‘zero suicide rate’ in mental health facilities, and ‘how the role of the built environment and staff training can be part of the solution’.

As the provider of the widest range of NHS mental health services in the UK, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust takes the safety of staff and patients very seriously.

A key theme at next month’s Design in Mental Health 2018 event will be the need for more clinical evidence that ‘interventions’ that impact patient space actually aid recovery.

A mental healthcare charity first established almost 70 years ago by Anna Freud is soon to re-locate from various ageing residential properties to a new purpose-built facility.

Safehinge Primera says it worked with architects, clinicians, facilities managers, infection control leads, and other key stakeholders, for 18 months to develop its award-winning Safehinge Symphony en-suite door.

Catherine Helliker, marketing manager at danfloor UK, a specialist manufacturer and supplier of commercial carpet, explains how danfloor helps architects and designers create spaces which are not only fit for purpose aesthetically and practically for service-users, patients, and staff, but are also able to withstand demanding use.

Oxehealth claims to be the world’s first company to offer technology that enables clinicians and carers to monitor human activity and vital signs ‘totally contact-free’ using only mass-produced optical sensors.

The design manager at specialist in electronic water efficiency controls, Dart Valley Systems, describes its approach to manufacturing for mental healthcare and other ‘secure’ applications.

A director at Medical Architecture discusses the imagination, thought, and collaboration that went into the design of a new adult autism inpatient unit at Morpeth’s Northgate Hospital, reportedly the UK’s first building specifically created for this service-user group.

Kent-headquartered Kingsway Group – a DIMHN member which designs and manufactures high quality doorsets, vision panels, and anti-ligature hardware – says it is in business ‘to push limits, challenge thinking, invest, and do what it takes to move safety and design in mental health environments to the next level’. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, visited the company’s headquarters to find out more about this fast-growing, forward-thinking business from sales director, Julian Hall.

A new inpatient mental healthcare building at Fieldhead Hospital in Wakefield which welcomed its first patients last month provides comfortable, flexible, and therapeutic accommodation for adult acute and older service-users to help speed recovery and a return to ‘normal life’. Replacing older, outdated villa-style accommodation, the £16.8 million Unity Centre will, on the completion of all the facilities next year, incorporate separate adult acute male and female wards, an older people’s ward, a psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU), and high quality activity, leisure, eating, and outdoor spaces, including a third lounge where patients of both sexes can mix and socialise. As The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered from the project team, the development is the biggest seen on the site for over a decade.

Speaking at May’s Design in Mental Health 2017 conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, DIMHN chair, Jenny Gill, associate director at Medical Architecture, Lianne Knotts, and director of Technical Publishing Services, Sue Holding, explained how they had worked closely together over the past year to produce a new Health Building Note, HBN 03-02, recently published, which provides guidance on the effective and age-appropriate design and construction of CAMHS facilities. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Among the many varied presentations at May’s Design in Mental Health 2017 conference in Solihull was one entitled ‘Fire safety in mental health’ in which Karen Byard, fire officer, Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, discussed an effective approach to ensuring and maintaining fire safety in mental healthcare facilities, and some of the challenges faced, drawing on the Trust’s experience in both acute inpatient facilities and service-users’ own homes. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

With both organisations having felt for some time that there was a lack of tailor-made and specific guidance on how to design and build high quality psychiatric intensive care units (or PICUs), the Design in Mental Health Network (DIMHN) and the National Association of Psychiatric Intensive Care and Low Secure units (NAPICU) have been working for the past year and a half on producing such a document – which they officially launched at the Design in Mental Health 2017 conference in Solihull in mid-May. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Phil Barsby, business development director at Intastop, a leader in providing solutions and products to address anti-ligature needs, explains the priority of patient safety at mental health establishments and NHS Trusts across the country, and the part that doortop alarms play in saving lives.

With the Mental Health Foundation’s National Mental Health Awareness Week 2017 having taken place just days before Design in Mental Health 2017 in Solihull, it was fitting that the guest speakers at this year’s DIMH Awards Dinner were award-winning mental health campaigners, Jonny Benjamin and his friend, Neil Laybourn, the man who persuaded him not to jump from the edge of London’s Waterloo Bridge one wintry January day in 2008 during a severe bout of depression. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.