Southern Derbyshire Community and Mental Health Trust
It was decided to pilot Adult Mental health as a Pathfinder project, not only because the expression of interest was submitted before the merger of the two Trusts, but because Adult Mental health alone is a vast and challenging service which covers both inpatient and community services and involves many different agencies.
The Trust saw the ethos of PALS as being in harmony with its core values and principles, most improtantly the provision of quality services to a large and diverse population with differing needs given the geographical disparity of the area dn the ethnic make-up of the population.
A small Project Team, including the Chairman who is also the Project Sponsor, decided to create a "network model". In plain language this means that given the diversity and multi-agency nature of Mental Health services in Southern Derbyshire, many different elements, or agencies, needed to be at the heart of the project and would form a network.
One of the first tasks was to form a reference group of key agencies (stakeholders) to ensure that as many people as possibel with key roles to play were involved in the development of the project and felt it was indeed their project too, not something handed to them on a platter.
A major element of the network was an exisiting 24-hour help line (FOCUSLINE) run by the National Schizophrenia Fellowship which was also to function as a PALS line, acting as the first port of call to the PALS office and in many instances resolving fairly straighforward queries and requests for information. This was already part of the work of the existing help line.
Independent advocates were heavily involved in drawing up a standard relating to joint and complementary working between themselves and PALS.
Building on good practice, service users were part of the project too, with one being a core member of the Project Team. This was to ensure that the project was develping from the perspective of service users and their needs and not the needs of the PALS service and the Trust. Southern Derbyshire Mental Health Service users are already widely involved in the design, implementation and monitoring of services via their User Involvement Strategy and the Trust's Policy for Involving Service Users.
A major milestone has been the appointment of a PALS admin worker and a PALS worker. There was a great deal of interest in the PALS worker post and after two full and demanding day s of interviewing some excellent applicants, a PALS worker has been appointed.
Since very early on in the process of developing PALS in Southern Derbyshire a group has been meeting with the aspiration of forming a network of PALS across all Trusts (totalling 7) in Southern Derbyshire.
Currently Greater and Central Derby PCTs are on the verge of appointing a PALS Manager and joint training across the whole of Southern Derbyshire is being planned for February/March 2002.
From the start, this project has aimed to be an inclusive joint venture and still continues to be as it evolves.
Contact:
Mark Ridge
Southern Derbyshire Community and Mental Health Trust
Tel: 01332 362221 ext 3785
email: mark.ridge@sderbys-cmhst.trent.nhs.uk
