Sainsbury Centre Calls For Better Public Services

A new strategy that sets out how to promote good mental health and what skills are needed to do it must be provided by the government, according to the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (SCMH).

In response to the government’s consultation period on its Commissioning Framework for Health and Wellbeing, the SCMH said that public services will struggle to promote good mental health without radical changes to their current structure.

“The Commissioning Framework presents a positive vision of public services working together for health and wellbeing. But it is short on the detail of how to achieve its goals,” said Linda Seymour, SCMH’s head of policy. Real progress will only be achieved if the people who use such services are actively involved in making commissioning decisions.

“We need a commitment to ‘skill-up’ the people who use services to play a pivotal role in designing, delivering and monitoring services.” Ms Seymour concluded by saying that good commissioning was the key to developing good mental health services and implored the government to invest in the skills and knowledge of commissioners across the country.