Our three strategic aims involve:
- Effectively treating serious mental illness.
- Working in partnership to promote mental well-being for all.
- Supporting others by sharing our clinical knowledge and expertise.
Effectively treating serious mental illness means ensuring that all service users have access to the right treatment to achieve the best possible clinical outcome for them. It means:
- Reliably providing treatment that helps people get well and stay well: clarity about what treatment options are provided where; targeting expertise to the treatment of those with the most complex needs; supporting and supervising the delivery of programmes of care within multi-disciplinary teams.
- Getting the fundamentals right. This includes ensuring that hospital and community services work as efficiently as possible to prevent people reaching "crisis point" wherever possible, and to promote recovery. At the same time, we need to make sure that people have rapid access to effective crisis services when and where they need it. We also need to ensure that the environments in which we provide care are clear and in good repair and that we recruit and train people with the personal qualities to deliver an empathic, sensitive, mental health service.
- A focus on recovery, which helps everyone who uses our services to maximise their potential. This includes: helping people access employment and education opportunities; not providing services that encourage institutionalisation within the community; and regularly reviewing packages of care to ensure that they are not creating dependence. We need to work with service users and their carers and social networks to support people "in their lives".
- Building on our track record of delivering nationally and internationally innovative specialist treatments. Using our knowledge and expertise, we need to develop new and innovative services that challenge the traditional ways of providing care. We also need to encourage innovation in other areas of service delivery, such as social care and housing provision.
- Continuing to train, recruit and retain expert mental health practitioners in all professions and disciplines. This includes developing new roles that diversify and strengthen the workforce. We also need to bolster expertise in areas where the Trust does not have such a strong track record.
- Creating a working environment where staff are able to do their job to the best of their ability without having to face any form of discrimination or harassment. Equally, it is about providing a healthcare service that recognises, respects and responds to the diversity of the local communities we serve.
- Broadening the multi-disciplinary team, to include a wider range of colleagues from other agencies and sectors. We need to develop expertise or ask for help from experts elsewhere in areas where we currently struggle (such as access to housing).
- Fitting our services to people, not people to services, ensuring that people moving between services are not hindered by arguments about inter-agency responsibilities that have no real bearing on their care.
- Involvement in research that helps us identify what works best and why.
Working in partnership to promote mental well-being for all means promoting good mental health in the local population as a whole. It means developing our role in areas such as:
- Supporting universal services [such as primary care, the voluntary sector, education and housing], not least through the provision of our knowledge and expertise. Providing supervision, support and advice to other agencies to help intervene to prevent situations worsening. Providing training and information to support other agencies in working with people with mental health problems.
- Providing expertise and services that help other agencies achieve their objectives, working with organisations such as the Benefits Agency, Local Authorities and the Police.
- Supporting the development of ever more effective user and carer networks.
- Promoting better public awareness and understanding of mental health issues. Challenging stigma and discrimination faced by people with mental health problems. Promoting good physical health for people with mental health problems. Working with employers to provide opportunities for service users.
- Providing infrastructure support to social enterprises that release the entrepreneurial spirit of service users.
- Taking a proactive role in community development; marketing our infrastructure expertise to support local business and community organisations, including providing advice and support to regeneration and community development initiatives. We also need to maximise the use of the training infrastructure provided by the Trust.
- Working with business to improve the mental well-being of employees in the workplace.
Sharing our knowledge and expertise means:
- Expanding our consultancy work based on our areas of clinical and organisational expertise.
- Sharing knowledge through making best use of technology. Providing supervision and advice through better use of tele-psychiatry.
- Maximising our role as an education provider.
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