RECENT NEWS

A new residential building for young people with mental illness, autism, and learning difficulties at St Andrew’s Healthcare’s Northampton site will be Europe’s largest facility of its kind when it opens this autumn, the charity and psychiatric services provider says.

Following an election held last year, two new personnel have joined the Design In Mental Health Network Board.

Staff working in mental healthcare sector should be better protected against assault in the future with the planned launch of a new partnership protocol by NHS Protect, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which will help the NHS, police, and CPS, ‘work together to respond to incidents of crime, investigate, and take appropriate cases forward for prosecution’.

In his first Autumn Statement since May's General Election, Chancellor George Osborne announced an increase in funding for mental health services.

As NHS workers become more mobile, and provide more services out in the community, NHS Protect has completed a survey of lone worker protection across the NHS in England, finding ‘wide variance’ in provision by employers.

Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (BSMHFT) is the UK’s first mental health Trust to install one of Dutch company Recornect’s Media Wall screens which it is planning to use ‘to help bring calm to distressed patients’.

A milestone in the major ongoing redevelopment at England’s best-known high secure mental healthcare facility was celebrated recently, with the topping out of one of the five new buildings which will make up the new Broadmoor Hospital near Bracknell.

Taking place from 3-4 November 2015 at Vox Birmingham, the UK’s first ‘cross-sector’ International Dementia Conference will ‘bring together leading figures from across the world and a variety of different industry backgrounds to learn and share ideas on the best solutions to tackle this global issue’.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has published information on every NHS Trust that provides mental health services in England to show the public how it decides which services it will inspect next and what it will focus on.

Nineteen mental health units located throughout the Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust estate now feature IP network-based video monitoring systems from Samsung Techwin – giving the ability to unobtrusively monitor patient activity.

An independent Commission report which examined some of the key factors behind shortages of adult mental health beds in the UK found that 'the so-called bed or admission crisis in adult mental health is very significantly a problem of discharges and alternatives to admission that can only be addressed through changes in services and management of the whole service'.

Building services specialist, Steven Hunt & Associates, has completed the mechanical and electrical concept design for a new £9.2 million Tier 4 CAMHS (Children & Adolescent Mental Health Service) facility, currently under construction on land owned by Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust at the Countess of Chester Health Park.

NHS England has launched the first stage of new programme to improve young people’s mental health services, allocating £30 m in funding to Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to improve eating disorder services, the goal being that 95 per cent of young patients with such a disorder should be seen within four weeks, or one week for urgent cases, by 2020.

Following the Prime Minister’s 2012 challenge to improve dementia care by 2015, the British Standards Institution (BSI) has published the PAS 1365 Code of practice for the recognition of dementia-friendly communities in England.

Over 20,000 people have given their views on the top priorities for re-shaping mental health services as part of a drive to develop a five-year national NHS strategy for people of all ages.

Blackpool-based Primera Life, which manufactures specialist window and door hardware, has made two new appointments to its team ‘in response to continued business growth, in turn fuelled by the increasing understanding of the importance of purpose-designed products for the mental healthcare sector’.

Villicare, the joint venture partnership between estates specialist, Ryhurst, and Cheshire & Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CWP), has ‘made significant savings by implementing and managing a commercially driven procurement process’ for the construction of its first capital project for CWP at the Countess of Chester Health Park.

A Finnish mental health start-up company says it hopes that an Internet-based service it has established that enables people seeking help with mental health issues to find the ‘right’ psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychotherapist, will become Europe’s leading mental health service portal.

Six leading mental health organisations recently joined forces to produce 'a plan of action' for the Government in the first 100 days of the new Parliament to help improve the lives of people with mental health problems.

Visitors to a new event held at the Royal College of Physicians in London last month were asked to consider art’s role in improving the healthcare environment.