National Happiness, Immortality & Freedom Service: Are the UK’s Mental Health Needs too much for the NHS?
Sat, Apr 23 2016 04:07
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Thursday 12th May 2016.
6pm to 8pm at Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, 75 Harborne
Road, Birmingham B15 3DH
As part of our ongoing collaboration with Birmingham Medical
Institute, we will be exploring the extraordinary demands that mental health is
making on the NHS, with a prestigious discussion panel that includes Luciana
Berger MP, Shadow Minister for Mental Health.
In January 2016 the Prime Minister announced ‘a revolution
in mental health treatment’. The previous year, the President of the Royal
College of Psychiatry had advised the NHS in England to commit to ‘the biggest
transformation of mental health care across the NHS in a generation, pledging
to help more than a million extra people and investing more than a billion
pounds a year by 2020/21’. A Mental Health Taskforce then set about creating
and publishing a five-year all-age national strategy for mental health.
Is this revolution enough to address what Luciana Berger MP
has referred to as a ‘perfect storm”? After all, patients are struggling to get
a referral, waiting times across the country are far too long, and ‘global
recession and austerity’ place strains on people everywhere.
Beneath all the talk of savings and efficiencies, you don’t
have to be a health economist to understand that if there is less money in
there will eventually be less care going out. Much is made of legally-enshrined
definitions of quality as ‘patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient
experience’. But if the primary aim and
money goes to wellbeing, happiness and preventative health, how do you fund the
treatment of pre-existing conditions such as psychosis?
Alongside austerity, the number of people detained subject
to the Mental Health Act 1983 has been growing, with the CQC informing us that ‘there
were over 50,000 uses of the Mental Health Act in 2012/13 – the highest number
ever recorded’. Efforts to reverse the
trend of costly and distressing detention with increased freedom and wellbeing can
rub up against aims for safety and the tragedies of suicide and homicide. Inquiries
all too often result in calls to observe patients more closely and not let them
leave hospital. Indeed if health professionals fail to deprive people of their
liberty, they are increasingly likely to lose their own liberty in the event of
a death. David Sellu, for instance, was found guilty of manslaughter by gross
negligence in 2013.
So in this brave new world, how can the NHS Mental Services
meet the UK’s mental health needs?
Speakers:
Luciana Berger
MP, Shadow Minister for Mental Health
Dr Jonathan
Shapiro, Chairman of Education for Health
Tamar Whyte,
Peer Worker
Inspector
Michael Brown, Mental Health Cop
Dr Muj Hussain,
Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist
The debate will be chaired by Dr Jonathan Hurlow.
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