RECENT NEWS

Skygd, a Swedish provider of lone working solutions, and Atus Systems, a UK provider of paging and on-site staff alarm systems, have announced a UK branding partnership.

The NHS in England has committed to ‘the biggest transformation of mental healthcare across the NHS in a generation’, pledging to help over a million extra people, and to invest more than £1 bn annually by 2020/21.

Delegates at this year’s Design in Mental Health conference at the National Conference Centre, Birmingham (taking place from 17-18 May, 2016) will be treated to keynotes from Tom Cahill, CEO of Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation NHS Trust, and former-service user, Ian Callaghan – now Recovery and Outcomes manager at Re-Think Mental Illness.

Four designs and eight colourways from Forbo Flooring Systems’ Marmoleum floor collection have created a durable, design-led, resilient surface flooring solution for NHS Tayside’s new CAMHS unit in Dundee.

A new 60-bed adult acute mental health unit at Farnham Road Hospital in Guildford, designed by PM Devereux and built by Laing O’Rourke, has opened on the site of an existing mental health service provided by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

A ‘passport-style’ brief of key facts that children and young people using mental health services can use to help them avoid repeating their history and preferences has been launched by NHS England.

A new three-year action and research study into living well with young onset dementia has been announced by the University of Salford’s Institute for Dementia and Salford City Council.

A Freedom of Information Act request by Mind has found that local authorities in England spend ‘an average of 1% of their public health budget on mental health’.

A new Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) for Sheffield Health & Social Care NHS Foundation Trust (SHSC NHS), Endcliffe, has been officially opened by the Trust’s chair, Professor Alan Walker CBE.

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'.