NEW Health and Wellbeing Clinic opens in Torbay

Posted on 19th January, 2016

This week saw our new Health and Wellbeing Clinic open in the Haytor Unit at Torbay Hospital. This will be the main centre for our services in Torbay and will provide a safe, comfortable and welcoming environment. As well as this main clinic, there will be a smaller ‘satellite’ clinic located at the Chadwell Centre in Preston, Paignton. Torbay is one of three Health and Wellbeing Clinics we are opening this year, with the Exeter clinic opening in the Spring at Wonford House, followed by North Devon at a later date.   The Health and Wellbeing Clinics will:

• Ensure people are supported by the full range of clinical staff – what we call a multi-disciplinary team. Doctors, nurses, psychologists, occupational therapists and other professionals will be on-hand to support people’s care.
• Help us to cover everything possible within a single appointment, avoiding the need for multiple assessments or to repeat a person’s story several times - which we know can be distressing.
• Enable us to make the best use of our resources, speed-up assessments and treatment and avoid bottlenecks and long waiting lists.
• Ensure people leave their assessment with a clear care plan, which will be explained to them and will focus on the things that are important to them, and a date for their next appointment.

We are expecting the majority of people’s initial assessments and some of their ongoing treatment appointments to take place at one of our main clinics. This mirrors the model for physical NHS care services, where most specialist treatment is conducted in a larger, acute hospital setting where there is a greater concentration of professionals, with the majority of followup and ongoing care being provided more locally. The creation of Mental Health and Wellbeing Clinics may mean additional travel for some people in our care, but we are confident that the improvements we are making will outweigh the inconvenience of extra travelling. However, we know that some people will be unable to travel and we will provide care and support in a place that suits your needs if this is the case.

Why are we making these changes?

Our services have grown and developed over many years and we know that many aspects of the care and support we provide are excellent. However, we need a greater level of consistency in the quality of our services and how they are delivered – from the time people first make contact with us to the time they recover and are discharged. We need to make better use of the money we receive every year to deliver our services which is currently about £130m a year. We want to invest as much as we can in delivering the best quality service we can - equipping staff to work more flexibly and enabling them to support more people. We want to minimise the money we spend on bricks and mortar and the amount of time our frontline staff spend in the car or in front of a computer. We currently operate around 60 sites across Devon and many of these are old, under-used or unfit for purpose. Running these buildings costs around £12m a year. We also want our services to be more closely integrated with other parts of the NHS, social care system and voluntary services. Working more closely with other providers of care will help us to deliver better support for people but it will also help to reduce the stigma that, sadly, is still often associated with having mental health needs or a learning disability. Read more in our leaflet

Keeping you informed

We want to keep you informed with the developments and changes that we are making to improve the care and support we provide for people who use our services. It is important that we get it right. Want to get involved? We want to continue to work with people who use our services, their carers and their families and we will be organising a series of drop-ins early in 2016 so that people can ask questions or share any concerns they may have.  The first of these events are taking place in Torbay: Monday 25 January 2016
Endeavour House 228 Union St, Torquay, TQ2 5QS
10 - 12noon Tuesday 26 January 2016
Paignton Library - Room 12 Great Western Road, Paignton TQ4 5AG
1 - 3pm
Telephone: For general enquiries during office hours - Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS): 0800 0730741 Email:
General Enquiries - Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS): dpn-tr.pals@nhs.net