RECENT NEWS

Research released last month by mental health charity, Mind, reveals serious problems with the planning around discharging people from mental health hospitals.

International design and technology practice, IBI Group, is collaborating with Hugh Baird College and Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust to design a ‘pioneering’ Health, Engagement, and Training Hub that will promote positive health and wellbeing in Bootle, Liverpool.

The Design in Mental Health Network (DIMHN) has recently made a few changes to its workstreams.

Kingsway Group says it is delighted to have been selected by the ProCure22 framework as the only mental health specialist doorset provider for the scheme.

York City Council has approved an application for a new 72-bed mental health hospital for adults and older persons on the city’s Haxby Road, expected to be completed in 2019.

Scenes from everyday life typical to the surrounding area, including of seagulls, the sea, and people eating fish and chips – all ‘recalling the joys of the outdoors of South Tyneside and South Shields’ – are captured in a range of illustrations introduced by art and design consultancy, Art in Site, into Haven Court, an integrated care hub in South Shields that supports elderly people’s health and wellbeing.

The Door & Hardware Federation (dhf) is emphasising the increasing importance of Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) to the construction industry – and particularly to architects, builders, and specifiers.

Mental health providers should adopt quality improvement to improve patient care, a new King’s Fund publication, The Quality improvement in mental health report, argues.

Construction has started on the new €160 million National Forensic Mental Health Hospital in Portrane, County Dublin, designed by Scott Tallon Walker Architects in collaboration with Medical Architecture, and scheduled to open in early 2020.

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, Kent County Council, and partners across east Kent and Europe, have secured ‘significant European funding’ for a ‘dementia village’ to be built near the former Buckland Hospital site in Dover.

Humber NHS Foundation Trust has applied for planning permission for a new multimillion pound mental health inpatient unit for children and young people in Hull.

NHS Property Services (NHSPS) has launched a ‘vacant space handback scheme’ to help NHS commissioners cut the cost of empty space in their buildings.

In a recently published Care Quality Commission report following a comprehensive threeyear inspection of all specialist mental health services in England – rating services provided by 54 NHS Trusts and 221 independent mental health locations – inspectors express concerns about ‘the poor physical environment of many mental health wards’.

Nottinghamshire Healthcare has officially opened a 16-bedded ward for adult mental health patients to ensure they can be treated closer to home, with the beds subcontracted from Priory Healthcare and Partnerships in Care in a two year-deal.

Dorset is now ‘home to one of the leading inpatient mental health services for young people in the country’, says the Dorset Children and Adolescent Mental Health Team (CAMHS), based at Pebble Lodge, Bournemouth, and run by Dorset HealthCare.

A pledge to treat an extra one million mental health patients by 2020/2021, provide ‘seven day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day’ services, and ‘integrate mental and physical health services for the first time’, were the highlights of a new plan unveiled this summer by Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

Capital funding has been made available by NHS England for the redesign St Charles’ Health Based Place of Safety to be larger, more comfortable, and more responsive to service users, their families and staff.

Nine new Learning Disability and Mental Health Nurses, who will work across wards at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch and Worcestershire Royal Hospital, joined Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust on September 25 in a move that the Trust describes as "innovative".

Crittall Holdings has acquired the trade and assets of Fendor – the Washington, Tyne and Wear-based manufacturer of high security, ballistic, and ‘bomb-proof’ fenestration, which also supplies windows used in custodial and mental health institutions and the petrochemical industry.

NTW Solutions (a subsidiary of Northumberland Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust) has selected Sir Robert McAlpine as its preferred delivery partner for a five-year strategic partnership expected to generate at least £50 m of construction turnover through a range of minor and major capital works.