A look at mental health and community services: a new report

One of the core roles of Healthwatch Lancashire is to champion the views of local people who access health and care services. We do this through focused projects, engaging with our local communities and working with local health and care services to influence improvements. 

For each project, we produce reports that summarise our findings and make recommendations for improvements. 

Our latest report is based on the experiences of local people accessing mental health and community services. 

About the report

The Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust (LSCFT) is currently working on updating its Clinical Strategy.

The LSCFT asked Healthwatch Together to support them by finding out what patients think of their services. Healthwatch Together is a collaboration of four local Healthwatch – Cumbria, Lancashire, Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwin. 

Healthwatch engaged with patients to hear what they thought had been working well and what areas could be improved.

The feedback would be combined with national data and previous academic research, to provide a picture of people’s experience of the Trust’s mental health and community services within Lancashire and South Cumbria and enable a comparison with the Trust’s refreshed Clinical Strategy Engagement Principles.

What we did

We connected with 74 respondents through video calls and over the phone to hear views about services including: 

• Dentistry
• Inpatient units
• Home Treatment and Mental Health Liaison
• District nursing
• Moving Well Service 

This project involved collecting qualitative data. An exploratory approach was taken to develop a deeper understanding of patient experiences.

Respondents were asked a range of questions, including: 

• What areas of care and treatment LSCFT have provided, are you happy with?
• What has LSCFT done well?
• Are there any areas that have caused you concern? 
• Thinking about your experience with us from start to finish and tell us of any areas you think we could improve? 

What we heard

There were 74 respondents to the overall project, covering 8 LSCFT services. Respondents have given invaluable feedback and themes for each service have emerged which have given insight into good practice and areas for improvement for each service to help inform the upcoming LSCFT Clinical Strategy.

Recommendations from the public included:

• Improving waiting times
• Creating peer support groups
• Help to signpost patients to support in the community
• More focus on fitness 

You can read all the recommendations for each service by taking a look at the report.