Local Involvement Network Slave Volunteers Or Pathfinders ? Ask Yourself

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Art By Art De Rivers & Silvis Rivers Dec 2010

The UK Dept of Health put out bulletin on 29th December based on moving the Govt "HealthWatch" policy forwards and woven into it is a 2008 - 9 UK wide Local Involvement Networks report that shows in some parts of the UK "LINks" as it called (lay monitoring and public and patient health engagements) supported by a DOH grant to Local Authorities did kind of , half-okay.

The great missing equation 1997 - 2010 in Labour's regime in health from the mental health UserWatch position was legal and equal rights to Patient Choice hidden away even as it now inside the strangulation of "secondary care regulations" that basically bars mental health patient choices whilst the DOH was busy making sure with the likes of the (Sainsbury's) Centre For Mental Health "stabilised" psychotics were given "choices" through the Direct Payment methods of eligibility for part service choice techniques, that dot Local Authority (LA) Social Care Services here and there in the UK, uneasily waiting for the recession promoted news of possible eligibility re-bandings.......

Seasoned UserWatchers in mental health, knew this LA Social Care "DP" Direct Payment method was not "real" Patient Choice in mental health but a skewered slimmed down rationed version of it that bought of a few well deserving Users, but rejected the rest as "Socially Include-able" and readied them up for the UK cannibal welfare stews because the unproductive classes in the UK cannot sell anything abroad very well and need to trade of the bones of any part of the welfare classes . Maybe you have not noticed. China has, but the fact it has all the jobs makes it shrug its large national shoulders .

Ahhh Cannibalism, with a bit of peppered press hate thrown in ...So UK ...

Don't get us wrong we applaud volunteers trying to make things better in Healthcare but the slip and slide of Govt's is not going to stop and in the great seas of acid and greasy social compromise , volunteers will simply be used up, and in terms of LINks evolving to HealthWatch we are not so sure the Local Authorities are the best place to hand over the HealthWatch budgets to , since they are both service providers and now the likely money keepers over the HealthWatch volunteers who may monitor them ... It appears the LA's will performance review too the very people monitoring them .. What bollox that is ..

Yeah all this right at time when the social shit of the under-performing bureau middle classes who exported very little but debt, is bailed out by everyone and the new class shifting sands has not yet resulted in a serious export led creative new basis and the net displacements of paying off the debts means the LA's have to cut services ... Oh dear, the temptation to gag monitors is going to be very high.

What it all means in HealthWatching terms is likely poor performance, or ritualistic performance , and a lack of cash we'll bet, to be given to the new HealthWatcher volunteers functions.

Accountability is a serious matter but it is not taken seriously by parts of Govt and some of their bureaucracies who see out-maneovering it, as simply part of their skill set tacitally nodded to by the politicians .

DOH quote 29th Dec 2010 :

"Healthwatch will usher in a new generation of patient champions with the resources and powers to support the needs of their local communities. I hope this report will act as a call to action for members of the public and LINks volunteers to lead the way in this reform and to become the first Healthwatch Pathfinders in England."

Watch out Volunteers for the new Local Authority master and slave trails inside HealthWatch .....

UW

Dept Of Health Announce DOH-tal Eclipse Danger Jan 4th

Cheers For The Warning HSJ Mogger

Watch Out For Dat Ol' Devil Moon

Its true they announced it !!!

LINK HERE

Interim Chief Medical Officer Warning for Partial Eclipse of the Sun Jan 4th 2011

Published date:
30 December 2010

Department of Health

People could permanently damage their eyesight and even risk blindness if they look directly at the moon passing between the sun and the earth between approximately 8.00am and 9.30am on 4 January 2011, the Government's Interim Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies warned today.

The safest way to watch the eclipse is on the television or live webcasts on the internet. Observing the eclipse directly through a telescope, binoculars or camera is not safe under any circumstances. In addition, sunglasses, and photographic film are also wholly inadequate and should not be used to view the eclipse. Only specially designed solar filters (bearing appropriate CE mark*) can be used to safely view the eclipse directly.

Actually at UserWatch we are speculating that the all powerful DOH Sun Department has deliberately arranged the DOH-tal eclipse as a way of saying they are still in charge of the Universe etc ....

Gawd its like being alive inside a giant Blue Peter show with a good little audience and the Queen and her Corgis pictured over the Christmas Ghost of Val Singleton (We go way way back here )

UW

Local Authority HealthWatch Hawks Worry LINks

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Arts By ADR

HSJ Mogger keeps his head down whilst the Local Authority unleashed HealthWatch hawk attack swoops - what can we make of it all Mr Lansley , Little Weed and Bill and Ben ?

Simply put there is a growing suspicion that far from locality power really taking off in health in terms of lay people volunteering and watching what happens and whether patients get a good deal the weakened Local Involvement Networks (LINks) (weakened initially by Labour) will fall victim to Local Authority hawkishness and dominion . Watch out for the influence of Social Care arena's in the UK for they give rise to many green skinned mutant staff who fell into radioactive management pools ..

We hear the true conversations amongst UK health activists and that's the worry being voiced. Contamination by Local Authority . The strange paradox a-wing though is, why is it that UK activists are so conformist and wait for a lead from others ..... Its not rocket science to watch and ask for information and raise concerns with parts of the public, and others interested in getting a good deal for patients - so why the strange icing up of democratic soul in health activism that we have been hearing about ?

Is there a Healthberg in the UK waiting to melt and flush activities all around ? . When will democracy thaw?

UW

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Ice Sculptured The Art Of NHS Freezing Pay

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Toon by Art De Rivers Dec 2010

The Rivers art lot of multiple cheekonalities have been at it again .... It appears on the icy horizon that new ice sculptures have been crafted and the NHS slave staffies are in wobble and slip mode as the whip winds of frozen pay (in return for no compulsory redundancies) get closer and closer ..

See : Nursing Times Article

How will it affect Service Users ? Longer waiting times , concealed "waiting lists" and anything to look efficient while misery increases ..

Now maybe the Bankers need ckuffinwell burning or at least nitrogen-freezing with being chilled out on all bonuses for years ......

Still , take a good look at what we did nationally for 30 years - denuded export capacity , gave way to middle class illusions of admin work for all , or pushing supermarket trolleys. We social engineered social engineers of everyone who socially engineered everyone else - supported head-ucation head-ucation - head-ucation and became UK-unreal and made ckuf all for others to purchase that would earn our way in the world .

Germany in the EU actually preserved its industrial base though while we, riddled with old hate for the mucky busted up basic dog (now welfare) classes, start to cannibalise their disabled futures .....

Who should get back to export led real-work ? The middle classes and their expanded Blair aspirers .

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Slowly The HealthWatch Axe Falls On LINks

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STARRING HSJ MOGGER

Local Authority Viking Raiders Raise The HealthWatch Axe

Some Local Involvement Networks (LINks) in the UK have evolved to do some partly useful monitoring of patient services while others have danced about and posed daintily .....Okay Daintily is what many have done with pinky sugars on too . Sugar coated monitoring has occurred and it only means too much of the NHS service has waltzed about with shitty knickers on which were not bum wiped ....Maybe HealthWatch will have bigger magnifying glasses - LINKs telescopes appears to have been quite weak and too distantly positioned .....

Daintily is useful though, for sneaky L.A. Vikings who realise a quick swipe here and there means disposing of muscle and putting onto a sharpened stick the scalp and talking heads that might be left over ... Beware the L.A. vikings they are a-sailing and want a ritualistic life made from lappy and lippy dancing ... 1066 is sort of back and we are in for a yawning change .

UW

HSJ Mogger on Moggabout In The Letterland Deserts

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Cheek Practice by Art De Rivers

Yeah it figures .... Health Watch is just code for the reverse ... Luckily Mogger is on the trail of Inside Outery and used to know RD Llaing's cat too named "De-mystification x 10".......

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Mental Health GP Consortia Response Vehicle In Hanging Bone Desert

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Have you got the picture ? Okay who is the bone ?

Come on admit it ..... !

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Tears On The Fire Bird - The Plight Of The Phoenix Day Centre

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Protest and Witness Poetries





By Silvis Rivers Birmingham UK .

QUOTE FROM ITS ALL ABOUT THE PROPHETS

" The mental health charities Like MIND and Rethink and Together with their media class of Time to Change and others have sold out on legal rights based Patient Choice of recovery treatments and condition management. Instead they with the NHS Primary Care Trust Commsissioners (Some of them ex-NIMHE-ites) and DOH have "shaped the market" (a term in common currency with PCT's) towards themselves as the "3rd" Sector and their paid Kapo Users - who tend toward over-control of others "

PatientGuard - UserWatch

The Plight Of The Phoenix - From ashes to ashes ? The Day Centre

Chilean Miner Dog Solidarity With UK MH Users Need For Patient Choice

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Dept Of Health Takes Giant Step On Mental Health Patient Choice UK

Mental Health 13 Years Of User Illusions - What Did You Do?

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Mental Health Arts The Pope's Spider And Oh-Jesus The Butterfly

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CLICK HERE FOR THE:
SENSITIVE PRACTICE GUIDE
FOR ADULTS/PROFESSIONALS
REGARDING LONG TERM EFFECTS
OF CHILD ABUSE POST TRAUMA

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Mental Health PathQuake Hits Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health

Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health
PathQuakes Over The Highcroft Hill

Oh dear , Purple Bunny and the NHS-Betics above have discovered a terrible Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health Pathquake over the hill .......Oh dear ... Strangely enough this was discovered at the same time as the Commons Public Account Committee noted that the Prime Providers of : "Pathways To Work" (strongly influenced by SCMH and Dr Bob Grove who worked for SCMH ) had pretty much blown £760 Million and actually done worse than the Jobcentres !! .

See 13th Sept 2010 Report From the Independent

Mental Health Users for whom Pathways To Work was also designed, were hardly helped at all and often "parked" . Why ? Because most were not fit enough anyway and demanded a lot of support that was often impractical in an economy that simply does not fit to magical thinking but certainly creates a lot of socially unsupported sinking ..

Many Mental Health Users were caught inside Labours 10 years of ideology paradoxes . There was no legal Patient Choice mechanisms added to special training help at an in-reach level. In other words training was instead "mainstreamed" (and unsuitable) rather than piloted in special ways inside the NHS contexts to help long term vulnerability . Who for instance could now learn how to operate digital skills online or offline since Trusts dumbed down on everything and overcontrolled everything or pushed it out via "social inclusion" ethos ... Gone was safe sanctuary, and the concept of aided growth inside a mental health community of vulnerability ....Oh apart from User-involvement which partly spawned a divisive class of elites that often sold their fellows out ...

SCMH and others just pushed anti-asylum ethos and pro "social inclusion" ethos in a real world struggling to create real work for many others who were fitter anyway ...

Therefore in mental health, economic context, and suitability for adaptation to real work was ignored by the planners and thinkers and NHS civil servants . Savings though were searched for in Day Services . They still are being targeted across the country and in Birmingham so we hear (tell us more) . The "elephant in the room" were the paradoxes of left wing and prayer over real care .. The paradoxes of no real work , no inreach training where it counts - inside the mental health community where personal growth might have been more possible to adapt people into launch capability - but of course Labour made sure no legal rights of Patient Choice existed either .... Users were bureau-job-fodder.

From the INDY :

" A flagship £760m programme to reduce the number of people on incapacity benefits only had "limited effect" and was not well implemented says a critical report published today.

The Pathways to Work programme contracted work to private providers who "seriously underperformed" and had lower success rates than Jobcentre Plus, the Commons Public Accounts Committee found. Between 2005 and 2009 the number of people on incapacity benefits reduced by just 125,000 and the committee said it could not be clear how many of these were due to the Pathways project."

Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust Where Is Your PD User Network ?

Where is the Community Personality Disorder User Network ?

While Staff Meet Up At A Nice Hotel ?

Got any defensive answers for this BSMHFT ? Come on - you all placed a CPDS service in the wrong area in the North of Birmingham UK . Didn't you ? What a waste of time and money ...

From what we hear, we wonder if it was designed to get minimum coverage , uptake and promotion to end up with the low numbers of uptakes that has made you lot self justifiably drag it off somewhere else . What a lousy deal this is for its so called mission statement to support people with long term issues of reverberating child abuse post trauma etc .

The Staff who were employed to create the User Network did what exactly ? What outreach pamphlets ? Outreach Groups ? Where ? Anyone know ? Everyone knows now your CPDS service before it barely started is planned to move off . Make it available flexibly and re-state it will create support groups for people in pain over their child abused history. Don't re-hive it off into an other unsuitable area for politically correct reasons where it did few people any good ..

Meanwhile your staff are off to a nice lunch at a nice hotel in Stafford with a minimum of PD Users in attendance and too often mainly those with network cream up their asses because in fact they should be protesting for a proper service in Birmingham instead of looking for NHS self-advantaging User-jobs..
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Mental Health Community Personality Disorder Service Birmingham Under Threat ?

UserWatch is aware from several Birmingham Service Users that all is not well with the Community Personality Disorder Services in the North of the city .

Our understanding is the newly designed (post Main House) CPDS stationed itself at a Day Centre known as the Soho Hopkins Day Centre near Handsworth - itself possibly scheduled for some kind of service re-design that may even involve partial closure .

Our information about the CPDS is it was supposed to provide a Tier 1 - 2 Day Service programme with a mixture of group-type therapy and activities . We are not sure how many Service Users took this up. Rumours suggest it was a small number put off by the location . We are certainly aware of criticisms of where this service was located in Soho Road near Handsworth . Soho Road represents an inner city area with a tough reputation and the question is was it the right place to station a CPD service that dealt with vulnerable people (males and females) with child abuse issues and sensitivities ? After all the CPDS acknowledged it had to deal with those issues in the people it was supposed to help .

We hear concerns too have arisen over what is happening with the User and Carer CPDS network . Apparently both these types of networks were supposed to exist contractually and the question is whether the Primary Care Trust that set these re-designed services up has had any time to performance manage the Service Level Delivery written out contractually to cover what the "networks" were supposed to achieve .. We think they've achieved very little indeed . That is what is being said to us !

The word is the CPDS has retreated for a time to its (as Service Users say) "Coffee and Bicuits Headquarters" in the North of the City which is near the Erdington Forensic Ardenleigh Centre . Its also rumoured it will not be staying there but probably retracting into some part of the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust - southwards .. Its the usual trend according to some Users ..

Mental Health User Apartheid ? One Rachel Fits All?

Illustration and poem courtesy of
Silvis Up The Pill of Hillvis Rivers

Jack Said :

There's a being
In the needle lune
Up there in the heart sky
God of prick
Satan cold science
Lacking Buddha's eye

I heard from the media today
How an ex-patient-psychologist wants everyone
Back to work
And I saw the muffle shuffle of local patients
That she implies are trained to shirk ..

Anal snakes now writhe
Tongues and languages curl
And the media shits on weakness
And the hate-show speeds its whirl ....

New Labour's UK mental health policies are still dragging about and waiting for the Coalition to power them up again . Mental Health Day Centres across the UK will be further targeted with new hot house schemes and Third Sector partners trying to socially engineer the long term mentally unwell into training and recovery and other types of choiceless mono-culture supply-side bollox which do not fit needs . For all the talk of modernisation in the UK we only ended up with a User elite selling everyone else out and promoting their own groups as the rest of everyone else . What do you think ?

Was there a solution ? Yeah .. Legal Patient Choice of recovery and condition management post crisis ..

We see the UK Guardian spider-writer Lady O-hero interviewed someone with new ideas who we hear was some kind of (service) "User",  now a NHS psychologist, speaks out against things like therapy dependence and yet implies dependency on meds is fine and work is implied as the main aim of "recovery" ... Right - gotcha. The vision they propose is "theirs though" and a mass projection of that ..? Yeah, how very individualized, but truthfully applicable to only  some people like that person wouldn't you think?  Some people do need support (dependency) for a very long time . The need of sanctuary is not a moral sin or necessarily a treatment failure.

What the UK Guardian never railed against consistently was the lack of legal Patient Choice in mental health (post crisis) and thus we are left with no equality of effect with the general population who can choose a consultant and secondary care provider. It was for instance , eminently possible to create patient choice mechanisms in Personality Disorders and post-crisis management which could have led to more recovery choices and initially inside the talking-emotionally supporting therapies ..But the Guardian looked the other way ..The law was set in Jan 2009 against Patient Choice in mental health . It still has not changed . Meanwhile under Labour the expansion of non-productive middle classes grew . So much for real productive expansions in the export trades like manufacturing .. (currently specialist manufacturting in the UK generates £ 300 Billion)

There is still not enough therapies for social damages in the community - we are hearing of real lives and real demand from people who have lost others, lost networks - lost babies - lost face in ethnic communities - never had parents - raped in care - sent mad by the system and more .. And Lady O-hero goes Guardian-ing away .. Guardian over what really , narrowness and limited top down social engineering approaches ..?

Forget people , lets make equations of "we imply we know best" eh and make it look like we are liberal and intelligent rather than right-wing and post Victorian ..

What a 19th century UK work-arse approach all this sad recovery anti sanctuary stuff in mental health care still is,  and we at UserWatch expect meds and SSRI's Prozac and Seroxat and Effexors and hills of pills to be suddenly health service popular again. The UK has the second biggest defence budget in the world an expanded and productivity-lacking middle class, and a hopeless massive class of people left in the wake of global development .

Positive depression is mental health reality of realistic vision ... Lets deal with an expanded overpaid middle class first please and the overpaid corporate bankers too and create sanctuary and individualised plans for life at the mental health care ends ..

Pattern Jack's Dental Mental Health And The Way He Coped

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Poem By Silvis Rivers

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Mental Health Arts : Jerry's Art And His Wings

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Video By Silvis Rivers

Salute To Jerry

Jerry is real enough and the UserWatchers amongst us know plenty like him . There's a bravery and pathos about some Schitzophrenics and the damaged lives they lead . The positive side of Jerry is his art and the way he bounces through life on it . A Day Centre man who has often lived through his internal trials of suicidal thoughts and someone who cannot care for his own life properly but through his damages he still lives on painting and drawing , with his thick black lines always containing him and his arts ..

Salute to you Jerry ....
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Mental Health New Drug 100% Effective - Companies Smile

FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful

Take NOTE Sandwell Mental Health Trust - Patient Safety Alert UK

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Sourced To The National Association For LINks Members (NALM)

Local Involvement Members who monitor Health and Social Care services in the UK have banded together in some parts of the the UK to form NALM . UserWatch has been sent a bulletin sourced to them which is self explanatory :

"URGENT ACTION

Dear Members, if a Trust that you monitor is on this list below we advise you to contact the Chief Executive urgently to ask what action they are taking to implement the SAFETY ALERTS issued by the National Patients Safety Agency. These alerts are meant to prevent deaths and serious harm to patients. We also recommend contacting your CQC regional manager to ask what action they are taking to ensure compliance with this critical safety tool. All of the Trust shown below have been asked by the DH to comply with the saftey alerts, yet some have increased the number not attended to. These are marked in green. The full report is attached.

All the best. Malcolm Alexander, Chair, NALM


CLICK ON TABLES BELOW FOR BETTER RESOLUTION











NHS TRUSTS STILL PUTTING LIVES AT UNNECESSARY RISK

Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA – the charity for patient safety and justice) has today published the findings of its latest research into whether NHS trusts are implementing potentially life-saving patient safety alerts issued by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA). The results make disturbing reading.

In spite of the public concern following AvMA’s first report in February 2010, which prompted the Department of Health to issue a reminder letter to all trusts NALM is collaborating with AvMA to ensure that all hospital and PCT comply with patient safety alerts :

"NALM is appalled that 25 hospitals in England have failed to take action in response to 10 or more Safety Alerts issued by the National Patients Safety Agency (NPSA).

We are alarmed that 4 Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), the bodies that pay for local health services and are supposed to ensure the highest standards of care, have between them failed to respond to 57 Safety Alerts.

Safety Alerts are issued by the NPSA to reduce the risk of harm to patients. In some cases failure to deal with a Safety Alert can lead to the death of a patient, incapacity or life long suffering.

NALM has also asked for assurances from the Department of Health and the NHS Litigation Authority action will be taken in every case where an NHS Trust has ignored a Safety Alert. We will also take steps to ensure that evidence of failure to comply is published in every part of the county." ·

As of 7th June 2010; there were 1,242 incidences of individual patient safety alerts, for which the deadline had passed, not having been complied with; 63% of trusts had failed to comply with at least one alert.

Only 37% declared that they had ‘completed’ all required actions in all alerts or that there was ‘no action required’; 29 trusts had not complied with 10 or more alerts. 11 of these are ‘Foundation’ trusts.

Even the extra-urgent “Rapid Response Alert’ on ‘Oxygen Safety in Hospitals’ (deadline for completion: 29th March 2010) had not been complied with by 116 trusts.

‘Safer Use of Injectable Medicines’ (Deadline 31st March 2008) had still not been complied with by 67 trusts. Both alerts, like the vast majority of them, had been sparked by a number of avoidable deaths and serious injuries.

As of 16th June, the national regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), had not contacted a single trust identified by our report of February 2010 – even those with multiple alerts outstanding, or alerts which were years past the deadline, to demand compliance or ask them to explain themselves.
There remains no central policy or guidance on who should be monitoring compliance with patient safety alerts, or who should intervene with trusts who are not complying; AvMA Chief Executive, Peter Walsh, said:

“These figures are staggering bearing in mind that we are dealing with recognised life and death issues, and the Department of Health itself issued a wake-up call to trusts following our last report. There can be no excuse for trusts continuing to put lives at unnecessary risk by not complying with these alerts. We commend the 146 trusts who have shown that the requirement to implement alerts by the deadline can be met for their commitment to patient safety. We are also grateful that at long last the CQC is taking some action, but we remain deeply concerned. Urgent action needs to be taken now over non compliant trusts. We also need to know how, following the cuts announced recently including abolition of the NPSA, the system can be made robust in the future”.

AvMA are seeking an urgent meeting with Ministers and the bodies responsible for quality and safety in the NHS to discuss the report and AvMA’s recommendations for addressing the problems it identified.

Mental Health Song : Starring Jack Origine No NHS Glues But Soul Shoes Blues

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Accompanied, So Silvis Rivers says, by Goorab Purple Bunny
and a Vaccum Cleaner pipe suitably recorded on Audacity .....

Mental Health - From Labour's Rigged Society To The Con-Dem's Bottom Up Boggery ?

UH OH, ITS BIG IDEAS AGAIN

GET YER SCREAMS OUT

MAKE OURS A DOUBLE


EXTRACTS FROM BUILDING A BIG SOCIETY

"First, we will help to catalyse social action by making better use of existing civic institutions. For example, we will devolve more powers to town halls, give new functions to post offices, protect local pubs and take action to safeguard local shops.

This paper for the first time explains how we will apply this approach to the civil service, one of Britain’s largest civic institutions. By making use of these institutions, we can help to embed a powerful new social norm on social action and community activism."

But then we have the thumbs up for the charitocracy ( that means MIND and Rethink and others will become the new MH State )

"First, public service reform. Our public sector reform programme is designed to cut costs while improving standards, and to enable social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups to play a leading role in delivering public services and tackling deep-rooted social problems. That is why we have developed a detailed framework for opening up public services to new suppliers, and improving accountability and value for money through techniques like payment-by-results, competitive tendering, publishing performance information, and giving people the opportunity to choose between competing providers.

To make these reforms work, we need to give new and existing social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups the long-term incentives they need to develop and deliver innovative and high quality public services, and this paper sets out new plans to do that. Specifically, this paper sets out new policies to provide social enterprises with the start-up funding and support they need to bid for government contracts or work towards delivering services under a payment-by-results model. "


Jeese then we come to the new State self funding Dad's Army (5000) and Care Raid Warden Patrols :

We will establish National Centres for Community Organising. We will fund the training of 5,000 independent community organisers over the lifetime of the next Parliament. This national army of community organisers will have the skills needed to raise funds to pay for their own salaries, help communities to establish and operate neighbourhood groups, and help neighbourhood groups to tackle difficult social challenges. In the US, the community organising endowment established by Saul Alinsky has trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama.

We think all this is a recipe not for the ex working class communities to band together and re-invent themselves into community groups and co-ops with real empowerment - but in fact an incentive for a new middle class take over of everyone's lives in an age-ing stressed out country...

However we are thinking of starting up a new DIY Coffin Making scheme ...

What do you think - read the BIG Society Document ..

Mental Health : Sue Turner Trust CEO Loses Press Complaint Suicide Trio Attempt

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SUE TURNER LOSES AT PRESS
COMPLAINTS COMMISSION
OVER PHOTO OF SUICIDE TRIO

Patient rights to have a voice are so often wrapped up inside the weaving corporate politics of NHS Trusts and partly this looks like such a case where the complicated context is of three patients who decided on a triple suicide attempt mixed into an alleged lack of Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust consultation over the closure of their special "Main House" Borderline PD Unit in February 2010 .

The Birmingham Mail did a thorough job of reporting the drama and used photo's in one of its several reports which were pixellated of the patients to prevent identification.

Sue Turner CEO of the Birmingham Mental Health Foundation Trust (pixellated above) made a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission against the Birmingham Mail for using the photos but the PCC have not upheld it . It was a sound judgment we think not to uphold the claim that these patients required the claimed level of confidentiality that Sue Turner implied .

The PCC claimed a relative of one of the distressed patients on behalf of that patient had supported the right to have a photo of them used . According to the New Statesman :

"journalists said a parent of one of the patients had supported the use of the images and that they had given a voice to mental health patients who had complained they were being ignored."

All of the patients involved were distressed at the closure of Main House . It was also locally rumoured that the BSMHFT had used legal advice to foreshorten any fuller consultation on the Main House closure. In fact it was the Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust that created pressure for a public and patient consultation of a full 3 months to occur. Pressure too for that came from patients and groups . That much seems partly borne out at the Health and Overview Scrutiny Committee (HOSC) which ordered at a scrutiny hearing that a full 3 months consultation should be observed.

Users in the PD (personality disordered) community outside of Main House though had spoken to each other about how the despair of the suicide three did also have the appearance of a desperate social political gesture . Why so desperate, and was their desperation actually the product of being really under-informed ?

What is still something of a mystery is this was a local context where Main House Borderline PD Unit was slowly losing its viability over several years and of its 24 beds less than half were taken over the last two years before it closed .

How many Users close to its actions and services knew this? . How strong is the User-informed culture in Birmingham ? Does the BSMHFT encourage enough openess to patients of detail about its operations? BSMHFT pride itself on an internal User Voice mechanism yet it comes under the control of the Trust. In mental health in Birmingham there is NO INDEPENDENT USER VOICE ..

Main House Unit viability was based on outside PCT's across the country purchasing its rather exclusive services which often involved people uprooting themselves for a year. Its staff costs , over the last two years of its operation, were not paid for by the "Out Of Area" PCT purchasing mechanism but in fact more by the BSMHF Trust. The Trust were making a "loss" .....

The Primary Care Trust at Birmingham East and North also from public domain HOSC paperwork we examined could have done far better at making sure Tier 4 (severe) BPD patients had provisions in place some time ago - maybe dovetailing User-visits to new places where provisions were to be purchased . The PCT estimated that in Birmingham, Tier 4 (severe Borderline symptoms) would only exist in 3 people per million so why there was a problem here between everyone, namely Trust and PCT provisioners getting this right for 3 people?

Its still a mystery and one which may well be being investigated . The Birmingham Mail should be made aware of that ..

The PCC also stated : (source Press Gazette )

"The PCC said that while it did not receive a complaint from a patient or their families it had taken the complaint forward as the NHS trust was an interested party."

SEE NEW STATESMAN FULL PCC STORY HERE

P.s. For the record UserWatch declares its magical love for Sue Turner and the fact that she is a pixie (pixellated) truly elates us ... Mwahhh ...(catch our pixellated lips below)

Mental Health : Unidentified Flying Needle Spotted - Evidence Shown

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By : Silvis "Pillvis" Rivers


"Come on Purple Bunny steer to Sanity-Land "

Said Purple Bandaged Jack The Long Term MH User..

Okay UserWatch receives strange pictures from sources who are a bit elevated or levitated or something . Anything to make you smile rather than spit at us sometimes.

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Mental Health: Sainsbury Name Withdrawn At Mental Health Centre

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Users On Benefits Have You Got £500

To Attend A Conference To Plan

Mental Health Users Futures In November ?

(read on)

Although the Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health on July 21st altered its name (deleting "Sainsbury" off it) its networking culture remains the same, and its been a powerful mono-driver (not a market and serious choice driver) in mental health planning, and some people attribute the one-size-fits-all Cognitive Behaviour Therapy "Layard" (14th Sept 2005 SCMH speech) thrust to it.

What is clear is in 2001 - 2 it founded the National Institute For Mental Health In England (NIMHE) and aided the then new NIMHE (cost £100 + million by 2009 ) mental health bureaucracy drawn mainly from University Educated Middle Classes that shaped it towards identifying "recovery" as getting mentally ill people back into work. That aim was its cornerstone and it over-rode patient choice of recovery treatments as a User-priority - instead everyone in mental health circles was treated to the User-involvement bureaucratization of patient-hood and the belief that "user-involvement" was the entry level strategy for working . All it proved was that fitter mental health Users got jobs with NIMHE and NHS Trust networks that supported NIMHE and its aims .

SCMH "Pathways to Work" designs and thrusts though have not created the new Jerusalem inside a neconomy that broadly supported middle class tertiary sector aspirations and social-engineering economies but not export driven business and manufacturing . These are very areas where economic and social recovery was needed for 20 years until the big sub prime debt wake up for the UK and others occured . SCMH promoted itself as experts in mental health, but was not expert into seeing into the open illusion that drove the growth of the middle classes in an unreal way across a UK economy and into record debt .

The National Mental Health Development Unit (NHMDU) shadowed itself into place as NIMHE was got rid of in 2009 .. On April 1st 2010 NMHDU bulletined :

"Promoting Recovery-focused services : The NMHDU has agreed a project-led partnership with the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health (SCMH), supported by the NHS Confederation, to promote and support recovery-focused organisations and services. The work builds on the recent SCMH programme, Making Recovery a Reality, and the clear support for recovery approaches in New Horizons. The project will pilot recovery-focused organisational development across selected local NHS sites (still to be determined) and will demonstrate and evaluate outcomes for providers and commissioners. Further information will be available on our website shortly."

SCMH's own bulletin below shows only that its still about in a different name after July 21st 2010 with an extra three years of Gatsby Foundation Grant (Sainsbury Trustees) until it finds its new funding - no doubt the lottery . All the other charities like MIND and Rethink (close associates of SCMH) use that route and one wonders whether there is serious lottery audit for grant effectiveness on corporate charities this size .

"From this month, Sainsbury Centre will be changing its name to Centre for Mental Health, it was announced today.

The name change will take effect from 21 July. It follows the approval by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation for the Centre's plans to sustain its work beyond the conclusion of the core grant it received each year between 1985 and 2010.

Joint chief executive Dr Bob Grove said: "As we develop our work and find new funding sources for the future, we are changing our name. But our work, our values and our approach will stay the same. As Centre for Mental Health, we have a clear mission to improve the life chances of people with mental health problems in the UK, building on the 25 years of work we have done and looking ahead to the many challenges we still face."

Later this year in November 2010 the large SCMH network and other people planners that failed to bring about real Patient Choice in mental health for 13 years of Labour rule will meet to decide everyone else's future in mental health for next 20 years .

The vision is still "work is recovery" and "personalisation" (not legal rights of Patient Choice) is the watered and socially controlled way forwards . They may have got rid of the the asylums and the Water Towers - but frankly these people are not producing any idea of sanctuary for serious difference of mind which does not fit the work-recovery and exposed "communitised" ways forwards . Users are still institutionalised by the planning classes so long as Patient Choice of recovery treatments does not exist

UserWatch has heard from many Users about how pushed around they are, by these social engineering ideas of them being "included" and "recovered" and how pressured some feel especially in the new contexts of changes to Disability Living Allowances , Employment Support Allowance and media "Hate the benefit claimant" headlines. Its even reached the Guardian (the Social Engineering Daily) now, so we hear - who are using MIND as the voice of charity concern even though MIND (along with Rethink) was busily over-shaping work-as-recovery under the Labour Government.

Will the mighty of the the SCMH network and DOH feel any of this sympathetically ? Of course not .. They are rubber ducks in a sea of class and charities and money which flows and flows and has grown because of the lottery .

Mental Health : The Pieces Reform Unless You Are Already In A Corral

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Department Of Health Looks For HealthWatch Overlord

USERWATCH have been sent a Job/Role Description for this position but before we show that - here's what we have to say :

What's in it for mental health ? God knows because the evidence we have is the Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health , Rethink and MIND plus the quango partnering all of them the National Mental Health Development Unit have substantial dominion over mental health and have created a following class (and gullible class) of paid flag wavers bent on creating provision centered on their "Third Sector" and State preferred ways forwards . Your voice is now already owned in mental health . There is unlikely to be a robust Patient Choice market because the State too have already decided on what's good for you . A rigged evidence base backs that and MIND and Rethink are just part of the major re-reinforcements for amongst other things the 18% effective CBT push (after publication bias is taken into account) with its bolted on inclusion provisions all targeted towards magical work very few have ever found in MH through Pathways to Work. Your voice is owned though perhaps only straight eyesight is going to aid your way forwards so your mouth utters : "FALSE" as a verdict . It will happen if you are open enough that's what we think .

Over to the DOH text sent to us :

Job Summary - HealthWatch

Public and Patient Experience and Engagement Division ( ppe@dh.gsi.gov.uk ) seeks to put people at the heart of care.

This post exists to bring drive, capacity and policy making expertise to support delivery of the new Government’s vision for putting patients and public centre-stage through strengthened patient experience, user and public engagement.

The Government’s White Paper commits to the establishment of HealthWatch – a new national body strengthening public voice and accountability - by April 2012.

This will be a significant and exciting policy development and implementation challenge requiring stakeholder engagement, legislation, policy development and project planning and delivery skills. This new post will be at the heart of the policy team leading the establishment of national HealthWatch and development of local HealthWatches offering unrivaled experience and exposure at the forefront of delivering the Government’s new vision for health and social care.

The post-holder will work closely with colleagues across government and routinely exploit opportunities for co-production of policy development and implementation working with and through PCTs, PbCs, FTs, LAs ,SHAs & GOs and other partners such as CQC.

The post-holder will be accountable to the Head of Innovation and Integration and will manage two team members.

Key requirements for the role This is a critical, high profile policy role having a major part to play in the development and implementation of HealthWatch.

The postholder will:

Develop and implement policy on Healthwatch and public engagement, inputting to legislation, maximising opportunities for co-design and co-production and ensuring early and proactive engagement of DH policy colleagues, OGDs and stakeholders

Actively promote public engagement and put in place systems to measure and monitor impact of public engagement activity

Handle a significant level of reactive and ministerial work, providing high quality and timely advice and support to Ministers,

Effectively manage people, financial resources and projects

Mental Health Quango NMHDU Survives For Now

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EHRC IS FACING CUTS !

In the first great cut of Quango's The Equality and Human Rights Commission is facing cuts .

Good, it deserves scrapping actually, for its political plays and overall bullshit string playing to its own marionette scripts .

The Independent writes :

Equality and Human Rights Commission – has been accused of wastefulness by Home Secretary and faces further cuts

It certainly did not do much good for people in mental health circles for even when it was confronted with the last Labour Govt's perverse discrimination against mental health (MH) Service Users and lack of legal rights of patient's choices they might make through elective care and a choice of a service provided through a secondary care provision (like the rest of the population ) - it did nothing at all .

There certainly were ways that (non crisis care ) Service Users could have used some MH provisions via patient choice but it was erased by top-down social engineering Labour who had the cheek to believe they were helping workless and working class people with mental health problems by making sure they had no choices - apart from state designed - MH charity architect-ed services ..

The National Mental Health Development Unit that grew out of the discredited NIMHE has hung on so far. It is backed by establishment figures though in the shape of big charities like its partner the Sainbury Centre For Mental Health . But it did not produce a sensible, treatment based patient choice orientated, mental health service . It has been desperately trying to create a recovery service which supervenes across patient needs and assumes its UK national work-orientated model is correct .

Yet its idealisation of work-recovery for all, has been costly and partly distracting whilst research done by the DWP shows clearly that people with Mental Health problems are not easy to fit into society and especially one which has a contrary economy with pretend jobs , social engineering , a lack of industrial infrastructure and a lot of bullshitting middle class Uni-types trying to fit everyone else up into politically correct but essential economically unreal lives.

The first job for the economy is to get the middle class mental-health-engineers doing useful export led economic work and drives . They are fit and clever people and should be put to proper work instead of parasiting about running false drives to get disabled others into work which isn't there, and was only propped up by Labour's balloon and party ideas ..

Maybe then some money might trickle towards aiding patients more . Don't bank on it though ...

Mental Health - Seroxat Jack - The Driven World And Personal Failure

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Picture By Silvis Rivers

Seroxat Jack By Art De Rivers

Personal failure is a very hard bridge to cross . Its about sometimes recognising very deep pain and special loss . Recognising limits and health problems . Recognising that the emotional reaction map is altering and must be navigated .

But there's no doubt with Seroxat Jack it was made worse because when his life failed at work due to his health and when he could not face the growing realisation that increasing disability was going to alter his life and even hurt it - there was no real help . No therapy offered to ease the emotional growth from pain into difficult change .

Thus depression born of a narrative of difficult-to-face pain created only vacant and sometimes fiery hopelessness . The fire of anger gives some degree of hope but not if the problems of change and disability are not faced enough - it merely builds more rage and determination to make something or someone pay .

Seroxat Jack, like Effexor Jim , and Prozac Jill and the SSRI gang, went to his Doctor and took his medicine and later found its emotional barrier effect did not do much good and so he came off it . That was accompanied only by pain and discontinuation problems - headaches and mood swings .

Yet Jack did not make the connection enough that his psychological problems were not medical in the first place but social and emotional.

Jack's a social product too of traditional beliefs in : the man should not show his feelings fully . His Doctor too was someone who should have been more emotionally literate.

Jack's rage and only partly faced pain after he painfully left his Seroxat days behind just gave vent to attacking pharmaceutical companies which on one level is not invalid at all. They DO exploit people who will not or cannot without help face their own lives and emotional pain. They DO exploit a lack of political will to create truly better emotional healing and long enough psychological therapies. They DO exploit the social taboo against people showing emotional weakness and vulnerability .

But they can only do that in the field of reactive depressions and mood swings "disorders" so long as Jack does not wish to face himself too, and demands only that his life-pain goes away .

Jack has partly grown now after living in the damned Seroxat Hall of himself . But to do it he had face another depression and the older feelings underneath and the extra ones which layered in as a sense of personal failure.

Life alters and we fail to be able to be what we were . Sadness and loss and even rage are not enemies they are just our cries at our vulnerable human condition and hearing them with witness makes bearing them tolerable .

Lets sit down with Jack and Jill and Jim and wisely accept a greater degree of grief for just being human .

Further Reading :

Seroxat Litigation Chronicles

The Coalition Government Consultation On GP Consortia ,HealthWatch , LINks

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An Important Consultation ?

Well its started . What is left of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) which Labour changed (some say deranged) to Local Involvement Networks (LINks) which have partly quick-sanded PPI in part of the UK , is now to evolve to HealthWatch and other arrangements under the Conservative-Lib-Dem Coalition Govt . Will it be effective ? Over to you .

The Consultation is to go on till 11th Oct 2010

The Consultation Document which
we have to say is well written is HERE

The Coalition plans are to bring to the public greater choice and local sensitivity by GP Commissioning Consortia that is not purely driven by the "top-down" centralism so typical of the previous Labour administration . Primary Care Trusts who have the commissioning duties currently are to go, and Health Overview Scrutiny Committees are to become absorbed by Health and Well Being Partnership Boards which will have local authority councilors on them to scrutinize local health arrangements. LINks are to feed into Local Authority hosted HealthWatch arrangements but they will have independent channels open to regulators to whistle-blow to .

Well its all up for extra consultation - over to you Joe and Jane Public ..

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Ombudsman To Review The M.P. Referral Filter

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(From the Ombudsman's site see the increase in complaints below
This is one for the archive )

Ombudsman’s Annual Report reveals 55 per cent increase in enquiries resolved

In her 2009-10 Annual Report, Making An Impact, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman Ann Abraham has revealed a 55 per cent increase in the number of enquiries resolved by her Office in the last year. Published today, the report shows that between 1 April 2009 and 31 March 2010, her Office resolved more than 24,000 enquiries, helping thousands of members of the public who felt they had been mistreated or suffered poor service at the hands of public services.

The closure of the Healthcare Commission on 31 March 2009 means the Ombudsman is now the second and final point of contact for anyone who wishes to make a complaint about the NHS in England. It is a simpler and faster system for the public, and as the Ombudsman explains in her report, the positive impact of this is already apparent. The transition has been smooth, with the Ombudsman’s Office successfully dealing with a significant increase in the number of health complaints received in 2009-10 – a total of 14,429, compared to 6,780 complaints in 2008-09.

At the same time, the number of complaints about parliamentary bodies has increased from 7,990 in 2008-2009 to 8,543 in the last year. The report also reveals the five government departments which have generated the greatest number of complaints: the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue & Customs, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Transport.

Ann Abraham also uses her Annual Report to affirm her commitment to making the system for parliamentary complaints more straightforward. Currently, anyone wishing to make a complaint to the Ombudsman about a parliamentary body must have it referred by a Member of Parliament. This is not necessary for health complaints. The report reveals that 235 complaints were withdrawn last year because the complainant did not get an MP referral, illustrating how this ‘MP filter’ can impede access to the Ombudsman for some. The Ombudsman will be seeking a range of views on this issue in the coming months.

In her report, the Ombudsman also shares the stories of some of the people her Office has helped during the last year. Among these are examples of complaints which have been successfully resolved through ‘intervention’, avoiding the need for a full, and more lengthy, formal investigation. Last year, 321 enquiries were resolved this way – more than double the number in the previous year.

Looking forward to the months ahead, Ann Abraham also warns that poor administration and customer service by public services can be an unnecessary drain on the public purse:

“It is evident that the delivery of good administration will be vital to the effective provision of public services in a straitened fiscal environment. My Office has a crucial role to play in helping Parliament hold public services to account in these areas and in highlighting areas for improvement. Poor customer service and maladministration wastes time and money. To ensure best value from limited resources, public bodies will need to get it right first time by focusing on their customers, acting fairly and transparently and seeking continuous improvement.”

Download the press release (29kb)

Download the full report (1.2mb)

Notes for Editors

1. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s 2009-10 Annual Report, Making an impact, was laid before Parliament on 14 July and is available here, together with the Ombudsman’s Resource Accounts 2009-10.
2. Ann Abraham holds the post of UK Parliamentary Ombudsman and is also Health Service Ombudsman for England. She is appointed by the Crown and is completely independent of Government and the NHS. Her role is to provide a service to the public by undertaking independent investigations into complaints that government departments, a range of other public bodies in the UK, and the NHS in England, have not acted properly or fairly or have provided a poor service. There is no charge for using the Ombudsman’s services.
3. For media enquiries, please call 0300 061 3924 or email Katherine.butler@ombudsman.org.uk.

Mental Health : Suicide Bridges And High Therapy Barriers

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By Art De Rivers - NewsPublic.com

"Doctor! Doctor! I need to tell you I am in terrible emotional pain and feel suicidal " - "Don't worry we'll build an expensive fence on a bridge" ....Was his reply ...

In fact the patient was some 400 people since 1918 who leapt from Toronto's Bloor Street Viaduct. To be sure the suicides have now stopped (from 9.3 a year to zero) on the bridge after the $5.5 million fence either side of it was erected .Toronto CTV News carry the full story

But do not cheer . People just chose other bridges and the overall suicide rate in the city remained more or less the same ( from 56.4 a year to 56.6)

The point of repeating this story though is to make a statement to enshrine it within . The obvious statement : Is bridge-fence "therapy" effective ?

(you are allowed a partly stupified surprised look on your face as you say this to yourself)

No its not really and as Dr Sinyor states :

"In order to really prevent suicides, you need programs that improve access to psychiatrists and other mental health workers, that improve the sense of hope. And barriers don't do that," he says. Sinyor says it's unfortunate that while there is often funding for concrete restriction projects, mental health support programs remain chronically underfunded."

This echoes other contexts of "barriers to therapy" too that imply self restraint of despair is desireable in the face of emotional desperation whilst not giving a place for that despair to find its unique narrative . Listening to people's life- pain stories and finding the point of tearful acceptances is not about engineering barriers but engineering the allowance of a voice of pain and sharing it toward healing and hearing .

On July 4th Lee Wright aged 58 in UK Birmingham committed suicide by jumping off a mental hospital roof he had found access to . The Birmingham Evening Mail carry the full story written by Alison Dayani . Was Lee Wright on "suicide watch" - did he have therapeutic help that was partnering him in his pain ? His family state :

“Lee was on suicide watch but got through a hatch in the hospital leading to the roof, where he fell to his death,” said the friend. “Everyone who knew Lee is asking themselves how was this allowed to happen? “He was under the care of ward staff, who should have been watching him so closely that there was no opportunity for him to get on to the roof in the first place. It is appalling.”

Has empathic feeling care and the ability to care been replaced by slick barriers and what passes for caring-performance ?

Two months before in May 2010 Barry Gibb committed suicide in North Birmingham UK by "falling" from a balcony - it was not reported by local papers. Barry suffered from schizophrenia although according to friends was a reachable man that was in pain about his life . His life rotated about being cared for but at least one person who knew him says :

"There is a need for a gradual and careful therapy to create a healing place for people like Barry to live with the sad life-pain he suffered and the sense of failures it brings . There's nothing wrong with facing facts but everything wrong in being left to wander in deep misery with them . Sometimes Barry was in deep misery and he should have had more therapeutic help . "

People end themselves to end pain that is not shared socially with the rest of us. Those are the barriers, on the bridges we might remake with greater openness so we all walk with a truer policy of rescue .

In Birmingham UK apparently there are now in 2010 some 70 Cognitive Behaviour Therapists now trained (after 1 year or so of an implementation programme) - a lot of them have no full field experience and frankly are following a rationing policy of sessions . Will they make a difference ? Possibly, but few are trained in grief resolution for issues like long term personal senses of failure and rescuing child abused survivors . Thought (CBT) over heart is the basis of their approach . In this sense its easy to see why some critics of State Therapy are seeing CBT as another long fence and barrier ..