Sunderland liaison mental health service – NCCMH
Sunderland’s liaison mental health service functions as a comprehensive service providing assessment and treatment to people presenting with mental health problems in the ED and the wider hospital.
Sunderland’s liaison mental health service functions as a comprehensive service providing assessment and treatment to people presenting with mental health problems in the ED and the wider hospital.
The service provides brief interventions in the ED such as dialectical behaviour therapy- based and solution-focused interventions. People presenting to Sunderland liaison service are provided with written care plans and information leaflets to help manage current or future crises, this includes telephone numbers of relevant support and emergency services.
Referrals are received from the ED, all inpatient wards and from other outpatient clinics to the liaison outpatient clinics. In an 8-week period, 94% of emergency referrals were people under 65 years (6% were 65 and over). The liaison team also receive urgent referrals; 45% of referrals received were from inpatient wards, of these 19% were under the age of 65 and 81% were 65 and over. These statistics are fairly standard for the service.
The dedicated Sunderland liaison service comprises 23 WTE band 6 nurses, four WTE band 7 nurses (of which one is the team manager) and five WTE band 3 support workers. There is also one WTE peer support worker, one WTE band 5 psychological wellbeing practitioner, three WTE band 5 nurses (supernumerary as training posts), one WTE 8b psychologist, two WTE psychiatrists, one WTE band 8b nurse consultant, one WTE band 8b pharmacist and three WTE administrative staff.
The service provides fortnightly CPD training for their own staff, as per PLAN standards and from the Competency Framework, and challenges that staff may face are dealt with quickly through discussion in local reflective practice groups and daily multidisciplinary team discussions. The team also provides extensive training to general hospital staff to improve the knowledge base around mental health problems.
The service is in the process of implementing the Framework for Routine Outcome Measurement in Liaison Psychiatry framework (FROM-LP) to assess patients’ views in order to monitor and improve services. The team is improving the monthly collection of these data.
The service provides follow-up care via outpatient clinics, offering people an average of between two and four sessions for medically unexplained symptoms, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, self-harm and perinatal mental health problems, and to support with complex prescribing visit this web-site. There are specific pieces of work being developed, including managing frequent attenders. The service is expanding and evolving within the same footprint as regards workforce. The team is able to do this by upskilling general hospital staff to manage less complex mental health presentations.