Feedback helps mental health services plan

Feedback helps mental health services plan

Feedback from people with experience of mental health or addictions is helping redesign local mental health services.

The West Coast Mental Health Review (2014) identified a number of ways that services could be made more accessible to the community, including having more help and support for people in their local communities and better alignment with other health services.

Late this year West Coast DHB Director Mental Health and Addiction Services Dr Cameron Lacey said the DHB was looking at ways to improve services for people who are not in hospital or under specialist care.

He welcomed input from people who had experience of West Coast mental health or addiction services: “It is also the right time to focus on how the needs of people with mental health and addiction challenges can best be responded to in the future. We have worked on what we want in terms of future direction and we now need to develop the detail of what this looks like in reality,” he said at the time.

The project team looking at future services said recent feedback from consumers had crystallised information received last year from consumer forums, other mental health providers and staff of the DHB services.

“We’re hearing that we need more clarity about how people get access to mental health support or services; and an increasing range of ways of supporting people in the community while they are recovering. We have already been looking at how we might incorporate this feedback into our service design,” Dr Lacey says.

There would be another opportunity for consumer input at future forums, to be held when the project team were ready to present more ideas about improvements to services.

“We want to thank those who took the time to let us know their ideas. It is vitally important to hear from those who receive care – they can tell us what their experiences were like and what we might want to improve. It’s been very helpful,” Dr Lacey says.

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