News

Over the last two years, Devon Partnership NHS Trust, Livewell Southwest and the Devon Mental Health Alliance have been working hard to improve community mental health services for adults with mental health needs.

These improvements have been part of a national programme called the Community Mental Health Framework which we have implemented across Devon to meet the needs of our population.

Working alongside people with lived experience and partner organisations including GPs, we have brought about significant improvements to ensure that community mental health services are truly personalised to individuals and more joined-up.

As part of these improvements, we are now using a new approach called the Personalised Care Framework (PCF) to help us assess, plan, review and coordinate a person's care. The PCF allows us to deliver holistic person-centred care in a flexible way to meet an individual's needs and goals, which we know can change at any time during their experience.

The Framework is based on the following principles:

• Providing intervention-based care and delivering a high quality, safe service
• Allocating a named keyworker within a multidisciplinary team approach - this means including all of the professionals involved in your journey of recovery, for example health, social care, housing and employment services
• High-quality, personalised care and support planning - care plans will be jointly developed by you, the professionals involved in your care and your wider support network
• Better support for, and involvement with, your family and support networks to provide safer and more effective care
• A much more accessible, responsive and flexible system in which support is tailored to your health, care and life needs.

Historically, this has been delivered using something called the Care Programme Approach (CPA), which was developed more than 30 years ago and doesn't allow for the same flexibility and personalisation that the PCF does.

Victoria Burns, Clinical Director, Community Development at DPT, said: "We are proud of the developments across our services over the last two years as we move towards creating a more personalised approach to care and treatment of adults across Devon experiencing mental health issues. The Personalised Care Framework really helps to solidify those changes and we hope gives people the power and confidence to get involved in their own care and recovery."

An important element of the Framework is measuring how an individual is progressing towards their goals, their quality of life and overall experience of care. This will be done using three different tools known as Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) - consisting of a simple questionnaire.

The questions cover different areas of an individual's life, treatment and goals. Responses can help ensure that those caring for you can focus on what matters to you.

Victoria added: "different tools we are using will help us to work with individual's taking a look at everything that's important in their life and that might be impacting on their mental health such as physical wellbeing or housing for example. Although they aren't compulsory to fill in, we strongly believe and know from other's experiences that using PROMs can really help towards making progress."