Mental health campaigner’s plea
Former nurse calls on chiefs to listen to patients
A mental health campaigner is calling on NHS Tayside to “authentically listen” when redesigning mental health services.
In 2017 a PLUS Perth survey found 90 per cent of respondents did not believe acute mental health beds should be centralised to Carseview in Dundee.
Carseview is proposed as the single site for inpatient mental health services despite patients saying they now feel less safe than they did in 2017.
Susan Scott is the development manager of mental health charity PLUS Perth.
The Pe r t h s h i re cha r i t y commissioned the 2021 Tayside Mental Health survey - published in September - in conjunction with Angus Voice and Dundee Healthy Minds Network. This followed a similar survey conducted by PLUS Perth in 2017.
Susan said: “In 2017, 90 per cent of the 390 people surveyed said they did not agree adult mental health inpatient services should be centralised at Carseview.
“In 2021, 50 per cent of people surveyed said they feel less safe in hospital compared with the 14 per cent asked the same question four years ago.
“When people are suffering mental distress the biggest help is having family around and being in close proximity to their own community.”
A former psychiatric nurse at Murray Royal, Susan believes centres like Carseview are “more clinical and sterile places than 20 years ago.”
She said: “They are not the best places to recover your life and feeling of self worth.
“They used to have more of a homely feel but now there’s a more dominant medical approach so diagnosing and medicating first.
“Perthshire is very rural. When a person is in hospital and starting to recover they try to adjust gradually by going back home for a few hours, checking on stuff like their mail, talking to neighbours but you cannot do that easily from Carseview. It’s not practical. The distance and clinical environment is not conducive to healing.”
Susan is calling on health and social care chiefs to “authentically listen without preconceived judgement and ideas.”
She believes the Mulberry Unit at Stracathro used a more human approach and was a “more healing place to be.” It was closed to acute inpatients in 2017 and relocated to Carseview.
Susan wants health bosses to move away from a dominant medical approach to a “whole life approach” first, such as Open Dialogue. This approach involves the person’s family, friends and life network as part of the recovery process.
At a meeting of the NHS Tayside board on Thursday, October 28, board member Donald McPherson NHS Tayside’s whistle-blowing champion described the recent stakeholder survey as a “difficult read.”
He asked NHS Tayside’s director of nursing - who was presenting a Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Services Update to the board - if an opportunity had been taken to reflect on the feedback given in the survey.
Perth and Kinross Integration Joint Board chairperson Bob Benson asked what engagement and communication there would be in the redesign programme.
In 2017, 90 per cent of the 390 people surveyed said they did not agree adult mental health inpatient services should be centralised at Carseview. Susan Scott
Director of nursing Claire Pearce said the survey was received with thanks and said: “We are using the opportunity to reflect on the information given.”