We commission the following four key services across our mental health and independent providers:
- Specialised children and young people’s mental health. Inpatient services and Tier 4 community alternatives - including services for young people with an eating disorder
- Medium and low secure services for adults with a mental illness and/or who have a learning disabilities and/or autism
- Specialised mental health services for adults who have an eating disorder
- Perinatal services. Mother and baby units that provide care for mothers experiencing mental health issues.
We can better meet the needs of all our patients by creating a single point of access for referrals, securing fast access to hospital where that is needed, and moving patients from hospitals out of the region back to services closer to home.
With a team of clinicians and referral management experts from across all our providers, we work with patients and their families to assess to offer the most suitable care for that person and wherever possible to offer an alternative to hospital admission.
We will also support patients' mental health conditions at the start of a diagnosis as well as support our patients following discharge from a hospital with much-needed advice, support, and guidance.
We aim to safely reduce the length of time people spend in hospital where that is appropriate by developing seamless services through the hospital into the community through our work with local authority and social care partners.
The people who use our services work with us to design future services and to help us assure the quality of care we commission.
"We, the patient, and carer advisory group, I work with, help anyone who needs support by doing NHS improvement which then means better services.
"The Provider Collaborative bring issues to us for new and existing services, and we talk about them and help by sharing our experiences and suggesting ideas of what or how to do it better.
"These ideas go back and forth until we have an agreement with everyone and change happens."
- Service user, Secure Services
By putting our patients and their carers, parents, and families at the heart of everything we do, our aim is to amplify the voices of those with living or lived experience of our care so we can learn and develop services that help meet these needs.
It is vital for us to work together and co-produce all our work jointly with professionals, patients, and carers alike and share equal power to develop and create services that make a difference now for our current patients and for all our future patients across the East of England.
