Devon Mental Health Care Criticised

Mental health patients in Devon are not getting robust enough care when they find themselves in crisis, according to a new report.

Over the past four years, mental health services have been responding to the NHS Mental Health Plan, which involves putting less emphasis on hospital beds and more on treating patients in the community.

Now an independent group that scrutinises the Devon Partnership Trust (DPT) says emergency care is not up to scratch.

Devon has seen a dramatic reduction in the number of beds available – in some cases more than half the beds have been lost. In response to this the Devon Partnership Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Forum and the Torbay PPI Forum drew up a “Community Alternatives to Bed Report”. They concluded crisis teams were having to make decisions on how ill patients are “with the knowledge of whether a bed is available”. So decisions were made on supply rather than need.

The report, published this week, added that alternatives to treatment at home or admission to hospital, such as day treatment services and Crisis accommodation, were not available in Devon.

It raised concerns about out-of-hours services, saying users had expressed frustration at using Devon Doctors on Call. It also highlighted a lack of round-the-clock access to mental health care across Devon and added that accessing the services of crisis support teams was “problematic”.

Alan Worthington, chairman of the Devon Partnership PPI Forum, said: “If the crisis team is not robust and if beds are in short supply because they’ve been lost then there are very few options to actually help people in crisis.”

Devon County Council’s independent Health and Adult Services Overview Scrutiny Committee also published its findings on community-based mental health services this week in response to concerns about bed closures.

The report made a number of recommendations, including expanding the function of the crisis resolution teams and making them available 24 hours a day; providing a specialist mental health doctor during out-of-hours periods and looking at establishing a “crisis house”.

The chairman of the task group, Councillor Stuart Baker, said: “While we have made a number of recommendations, it is important to make it clear that our overall view of DPT is that it provides good services within the confines of limited financial resources available to fund mental health services in Devon.”

A DPT spokesman said: “There will always be hospital beds for those who need them, but only a tiny percentage of people who have mental health needs will ever require hospital care.

“We need to focus our resources on the greatest area of need and, as we continue the shift of emphasis away from hospital services, we need to ensure that we have excellent community services in place.

“We have already made a great deal of headway but readily acknowledge that there is more to do – particularly in ensuring robust services to support people in a crisis and to provide help out-of-hours.”

No comparable reports have as yet been released from Cornwall. A spokes- woman for the Cornwall Partnership Trust said it was “difficult to comment” on the state of mental health services in the county in the light of Devon’s reports. She said the county offered both in- patient and community-based care.