Partnerships and collaboration

Collaboration and coproduction are at the heart of everything we do. From recruitment interviews to the design of new services and pathways, we take every opportunity to seek people's views in helping to shape and improve our work. This includes ongoing dialogue with people who have lived experience of mental health, learning disability and neurodiversity issues, our staff, our partners and other stakeholders.

Our Multi-Disciplinary Teams (MDTs) are a good example of this collaboration in practice. They are inclusive and diverse, and they value this diversity. We know that they have good clinical outcomes and have fewer serious safety incidents. They are also skilled at working together with equally-valued clinical professions, people with lived experience, families and social networks, non-clinical professions and system and agency partners.

In recent years, closer collaboration with our colleagues in the VCSE sector has been particularly important and productive and we aim to strengthen this relationship further as we move forward. Collaborating and true partnership working can only occur when key principles of openness, equality, diversity and inclusion are followed.

We adopt an outward-looking mindset in all of our work with colleagues across organisational boundaries, including our key partners such as GPs, acute hospitals, the police, ambulance service, social care providers and the VCSE sector.

We recognise, of course, that factors such as housing, employment, social networks and education are key determinants of a person's health.

We have both a role and a responsibility to share our unique expertise and advice wherever our partners and the people they support may find it useful.

We recognise, too, the importance and role of physical health alongside mental health, as we increasingly take a biopsychosocial approach to supporting people, and we value the skills and experience of our partners in helping us to develop this approach more effectively.