Mental health care under fire yet again (From Swindon Advertiser)

Mental health care under fire yet again

10:00am Saturday 18th August 2012 in News By Stephanie Tye

THE Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust has been criticised in a Care Quality Commission Report.

The report, which was released yesterday, found that the organisation had failed in four out of five areas inspected, including not having enough skilled, qualifed staff to meet people's needs and them safe.

It comes a month after the trust was criticised in a separate report following murders carried out by two of its patients, Timothy Crook and Michael Harris, in 2007.

As part of the inspection, the CQC visited 11 community teams in Bristol, Swindon, North Wiltshire, South Gloucestershire, Bath and North East Somerset between June 13 and 28. They spoke with various people who used services as well as staff and looked at satisfaction survey data, as well as information relating to complaint and enquiries received by the trust in the preceding six months.

The four areas the trust was found to be non-compliant with were: respecting and involving people who use services; care and welfare of people who use services; staffing; and assessing and monitoring the quality of service provision.

All of the failures were found to have a moderate impact on users, but the trust said it was confident that they would not exist the next time it was inspected.

It was found to safeguard people who use the services from abuse.

A spokeswoman for the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust said: “These inspections were undertaken midway through a major redesign project involving more than 700 staff and 30 teams, designed to tackle historical weaknesses and to deliver more responsive services.

“During this transition, a range of measures was put in place to ensure service users were supported effectively, but the scale of change caused some short-term problems which we reported to the CQC ahead of the inspection.

“Some of the problems were exacerbated by initial difficulties in recruiting permanent staff with the right skills but in recent weeks more than 30 people have been recruited and more are in the pipeline, reducing reliance on temporary staff.

“We recognise that any major change is unsettling which is why we have done our best to support service users, carers and staff through the transition from the old to the new service.

“We are confident that we have the right actions in place to deal with the issues highlighted in the CQC report and are confident that when we are next inspected these moderate concerns will no longer exist.”