Lots to discuss and plenty to see at annual event

The two-day conference programme at Design in Mental Health 2017 – which takes place at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull from 16-17 May (see www.designinmentalhealth.com for full details) – will begin with a welcome address from DIMHN chair, Jenny Gill, with the first day’s opening keynote then given by Jacqui Dyer MBE, vice-chair of the Mental Health Task Force. With a background in adult mental health commissioning and community and family social work, Jacqui Dyer has worked as an independent health and social care consultant with a wide range of vulnerable care groups, and has been a service-user and carer for the past 25 years. She is currently a senior management board lived experience advisor for the Department of Health’s national ‘Time To Change’ anti-stigma and discrimination campaign, and an appointed member of the Ministerial Advisory Group for Mental Health. Against a backdrop where she says there is ‘an over-representation of black communities in detained mental health services’, her presentation will address the topic, ‘Can better design in mental health help black people thrive?’

The morning’s second keynote, ‘Old problems, new solutions’, will be given by Lord Nigel Crisp, a cross-bench member of the House of Lords, who was chief executive of the NHS and Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health from 2000-2006, and chairs an Independent Commission set up in 2015 to address the issues facing adult patients in England needing acute care for mental health problems. In February 2016 the Commission’s report, Old Problems, New Solutions: Improving Acute Psychiatric Care for Adults in England, concluded that ‘access to acute care for severely ill adult mental health patients is inadequate nationally and, in some cases, potentially dangerous, with major problems both in admissions to psychiatric wards and in providing alternative care and treatment in the community’. Lord Crisp is expected to discuss the establishment of the Commission, and the background to, and work that has gone into, its reports.

The morning will also see DIMHN President, Joe Forster, chair a session, ‘Design guidance for 21st century Psychiatric Intensive Care Units’, focusing on work over the past year by DIMHN and the National Association of Psychiatric Intensive Care Units (NAPICU) to jointly produce new guidance on the design of psychiatric intensive care units. Speaking at its unveiling will be Jenny Gill, and from NAPICU, executive member, Chris Dzitiki, who is strategic programme manager at NHS England, and director of Operations, Caroline Parker, consultant pharmacist, Mental Health, at Central & North West London NHS Foundation Trust.