RECENT NEWS

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.

Right here, right now, a report published in June by the Care Quality Commission highlighting people's experiences of help, care, and support, during a mental health crisis, says one in 12 of those questioned reported coming into contact with between six and 10 different services.

Half of England is now covered by a new service to ensure that people with mental health conditions, learning disabilities, or 'other vulnerabilities', are supported in police custody and the courts.