Colchester and Tendring Specialist Community Mental Health Team

The Colchester Specialist Mental Health Team (CSMHT) and the Tendring Specialist Mental Health Team (TSMHT) provide assessment and treatment for individuals who are registered locally with a GP and experiencing a Serious Mental Illness (SMI). Each team covers each borough within the North East Essex region, Colchester and Tendring.

Both teams are part of the North East Essex Health & Wellbeing Alliance, and we’re actively committed to working collaboratively with other services to improve the health and wellbeing of our service users and local residents. This includes partnership working with the many member organisations currently involved.

The Specialist Mental Health Team’s offer assessment and treatment for individuals registered with a local GP who suffer from a Serious Mental Illness (SMI). Each team has a Multi-Disciplinary Team comprising of Mental Health Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Social Workers, Psychiatrists and Support Workers. All the staff work collaboratively with service users to define needs and goals, working with service user’s own strengths.

Both services provide a range of interventions and support for the treatment of patient with SMI. This following is a non-exhaustive list of interventions the team can provide for those assessed as requiring the service;

• Involvement of a care coordinator – To support individuals who have complex needs, including physical, social, environment and psychological factors. Typically providing time limited pieces of work and supporting those with significant levels of risk.
• Involvement of a lead practitioner – To complete care planning with service users and provide specific & time-limited input where appropriate and/or referring & sign posting to local community services.
• Access to our 'Starting My Recovery Groups', providing brief psychologically informed interventions – representing the pathway for referral-on to the North East Essex Adult Community Psychology Team
• Review with a psychiatrist for the purpose of diagnoses to inform the context of a treatment plan, this plan can then be actioned by a GP.
• Access to a psychiatrist for the purposes of treatment where it is not appropriate to provide advice to the GP directly.
• Monitoring individuals with established 117 needs under the Mental Health Act which are held by Essex and who reside in the north east Essex region.
• A dedicate duty service operating during working for individuals with an open referral to the Specialist Community Mental Health Teams who require urgent advice or crisis support. In addition to the 111, select the option for mental health crisis, service which operates out of hours.
• Providing carer’s assessments to those carer’s where a service user has an open to a team
• Access to our dedicated physical health clinics for ongoing monitoring of health; including, blood tests, ECG’s, weight checks and general physical observations.

GPs and other professionals can refer via their Primary Care Mental Health Nurses or directly to the team via the Single Point of Access.