THE MENTAL HEALTH COLLABORATIVE

Publication Date: 07/08/2008

The Mental Health Collaborative is a 3-year programme, developed by the Scottish Government and hosted in partnership with NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, to support staff working in menal health services across Scotland to develop a culture whereby they are continously looking at how they can improve services. The Collaborative approach has been succesfully used worldwide to improve health services.

The Mental Health Collaborative has a particular focus on supporting services to make the improvements needed to:

• reduce the annual increase in prescription of anti-depressants
• reduce the number of readmissions to psychatric wards
• achieve agreed improvements in the early diagnosis and management of patients with dementia by March 2011
• improve the quality of healthcare experienced

The focus of the Collaborative is on:

• training staff in techniques they can use to improve services and then supporting them to use these techniques in their everyday work
• identifying those changes that will have the greatest impact on outcomes for service users and then sharing this information with services to help them focus their attention on the things that will make the biggest difference
• creating forums for staff from across Scotland to come together and share information about which changes have worked and which haven't
• supporting services to use information better to inform change - enabling those involved in change to think about that information they will use to assess whether it's worked and how they will collect and analyse this information

We've identified that there are cross-overs between this work and the work of the Mental Health ICP Programme. For instance, both programmes are interested in supporting staff to redesign processes to deliver evidence-based care and both programmes are focused on the use of information to identify areas for further improvement. Where we have issues in common, we've committed to work together to ensure a joined-up approach to the support we provide to NHS boards.

These are exciting times for mental health services and we hope that working together we can enable significant improvement to the delivery of mental health services.

For more information, please contact:

Ruth Glassborow
National Programme Manager
Mental Health Collaborative
Ruth.Glassborow@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

More information on continuous improvement can be found here.