December has seen our ward teams settle into their regular rhythms of weekly coaching. Teams have worked to: finalise their plans for change, collect initial baseline data and feedback, and even begin implementing their change ideas.

We would like to say a huge thank you for all of your hard work in bringing your projects to life, especially given the challenges facing mental health services at this time of year. Wem look forward to continuing this work with you in the New Year!

As a reminder, if you are unable to attend a session, please try to let your team and your coach know in advance. If the team can’t attend a session, please speak to your coach about opportunities to reschedule the slot.

The executive sponsors have also been discussing how they can address the issues around patient inequities at a strategic/ organisational level and support their teams to succeed. 

As we are now halfway through the coaching period, teams have been having their midpoint check-ins with their exec sponsors to review their progress and next steps. We hope that by mid-January all of the teams will have been able to meet with their exec sponsor. 

Executive sponsors are also encouraged to visit the wards in-person to see the changes in action, appreciate the context their teams are working in and recognise the hard work they are putting into this project. 

1. Lived Experience Community of Practice (online)

Upcoming dates: 
16th January, 10.30-12.00
13th February, 10.30-12.00
13th March, 10.30-12.00

Invitation: The invitations were sent out in the email version of the newsletter as iCal attachments. If you would like to attend but have not received the links yet, please email mhaqi@thepsc.co.uk 

We invite you to bring your experiences and ideas to help shape this important group. For questions or to learn more, please contact Eleanor Levy at ellewasal@gmail.com

2. Lived Experience Creative Writing Sessions

Upcoming dates: 
23rd January, 15.00-16.30
20th February, 15.00-16.30
27th March, 15.00-16.30

Invitation: The invitations will be sent out separately to those who have expressed interest in attending. There are still a couple of spaces left for these workshops, so if you are interested in attending please contact Eleanor Levy at ellewasal@gmail.com.
To note: the idea is for workshop participants to attend all three events in the series. 

Facilitated by the wonderful Michele Powponne, this series of three workshop sessions are a space for lived experience practitioners engaged in the MHA QI Programme to explore creative mediums for representing lived experience. 

3. Mental Health Network Webinar: Learnings from the National Mental Health Act Quality Improvement Programme

Date: Tuesday 11th February, 12.00-13.00

Invitation: To sign up for this webinar, please click on the booking link 

Join us to discuss ideas, learning and impact from inpatient ward teams who have participated in the main phase of the National Mental Health Act QI programme.

4. MHA QI Programme Workshop C

Date: Tuesday 11th March, 13:00-16:00

Invitation: The invitation was sent out via email and in the email version of the newsletter as an iCal attachment. If you would like to attend but have not received the link yet, please email mhaqi@thepsc.co.uk

This workshop will be an opportunity for the ward teams participating in this phase of the programme to share the work they have done and the results achieved with other participating teams. 

Community of Practice:

The inaugural meeting was well-attended and featured discussions on topics such as the importance of co-production and the challenges to achieving systemic change. 

Going forwards, the community of practice will be meeting monthly (see the ‘upcoming events’ section for dates) to continue their work to address these issues. If you were unable to attend this first session but would like to be involved in the future, please contact Eleanor Levy at ellewasal@gmail.com. 

Creative Expressions of Lived Experience:

We are also thrilled to be able to offer three creative writing sessions for individuals with lived experience in the New Year, facilitated by the wonderful Michele Powponne. If you would be interested in participating in such sessions in the future, please contact mhaqi@thepsc.co.uk. 

To kickstart this work on creative expressions of lived experience, we are honoured to share a poem written by our lived experience practitioner Eleanor Levy. Her work entitled ‘Cognitive Delay’, which you can find as a PDF below, is a beautiful and powerful piece that we highly recommend reading!

Recruitment of Lived Experience Practitioners:

The work of this programme strongly values the role of lived experience practitioners in projects like this. For the teams who have yet to recruit an LEP as part of their project team, please reach out to your coach/ executive sponsor if you would like help with this. It is also worth clarifying both with your trust and with the lived experience practitioners in your team the expectations and guidelines around remuneration for their work. 

Through this programme, we would like to highlight and reflect on two of the statutory/ mandatory frameworks developed to help tackle the inequities in experience faced by our three target patient cohorts: 
PCREF (Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework)
Mental Health Units Use of Force Act 2018 

There are multiple components to these frameworks and their successful adoption. A crucial foundation stone is the ongoing collection, analysis and review of appropriate data to monitor the experience of service users. 

Just as the project teams began their improvement days with an analysis of patient demographics and the use of restrictive practice on their wards, so too the PCREF identifies monitoring core measures at board level on a regular basis as a key step to identifying and evaluating priority areas for improvement. 

This month, we are encouraging executive sponsors and ward teams to reflect on how they currently collect and use this type of data, and where there may be opportunities for improvement? 

Now most teams have a clear change idea and plan, we have analysed the change ideas across the different ward teams, and identified 4 main thematic areas for change (see the attached PDF at the bottom of this newsletter for more details): 

• Co-producing care with patients and carers
• Understanding and promoting patients’ identities 
• Empowering staff to offer culturally- and trauma-informed care to patients
• Identifying and meeting patients’ sensory and communication needs 

If you would be interested in linking up with other wards working with a similar patient cohort or a similar change idea, including teams from the pilot phase, please speak to your coach. 

For those teams who haven’t consolidated their change idea yet, we strongly encourage you to discuss this as a team and finalise with your coach in your next session. 

Coaches’ corner:

As we try and embed discussions of equity into our regular practice, one tool for teams to try is the equity huddle cards (available to download as a PDF below). Focusing on different equity-related topics, these cards provide question prompts for 10 minute reflections/ conversations among groups. See if you can have a go at using these cards in an upcoming group session or meeting! 

What we’ve been reading/ watching:

1) A Life Less Safe: telling the real stories of health inequities through research and film

Featuring two studies and a short film, this project combined quantitative and qualitative data collection with creative methods for representing lived experience to explore whether COVID-19 exacerbated ethnic health inequalities in adults with serious mental and physical health conditions.

2) Community Mental Healthcare: A Case Study of Trieste

The Italian city of Trieste has developed an interesting model of community mental healthcare as a case study for the benefits of strong community-based services.