NHS England pledges £750k to Bristol Royal Infirmary for 24 hour psychiatric liaison service

NHS England has awarded University Hospitals Bristol
NHS Foundation Trust (UH Bristol) £750k to extend psychiatric liaison services
in the emergency department at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. This means they
will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The award is part of NHS
England’s new delivery plan to push through the changes set out in its Five
Year Forward View.

The trust has already extended its psychiatric liaison
service into evenings and weekends, as a result of the work of the Improving Care in Self-Harm Health Integration Team (STITCH HIT). The STITCH team had identified that most people
attending the emergency department following self-harm did so outside the normal
weekday, 9am-5pm service. Funding secured from Bristol
Clinical Commissioning Group enables the service to go some way towards better meeting the needs of these patients. The new funding will build on this successful foundation which has saved the trust £170k a year.

The award is part of a larger NHS England investment to meet
the priorities of patients and the public across the region over the next two
years by better integrating health and care services. Patients in the South
West will see services increasingly delivered in a joined-up way, helping to
deliver greater access to services in primary care and in patients’ own homes,
as well as more options for accessing urgent care.

Two-and-a-half years on since the publication of the
widely-welcomed NHS Five Year Forward View, the NHS Delivery Plan sets out the
changes which will take place across the health service in key areas,
including:

• Boosting mental health services
• A national commitment to end out-of-area care
  placements for children and young people by increasing the number of beds
  available by 10 per cent
• Mental health services for new mothers will also
  be increased and more mental health professionals in the community and
  hospitals will help prevent crisis admissions by ensuring more patients get
  help sooner
• NHS England has offered £30m to 74 sites around
  the country that have made successful bids to achieve the ‘Core 24’ standard
  for mental health liaison, meaning a fully-staffed team operating 24/7 in a
  hospital, offering a one-hour response to emergency mental health referrals in
  A&E. One of the successful sites was UH Bristol
• Improved
  cancer care
  – aimed at saving an additional 5,000 lives a year across
  England, patients will have access to state-of-the-art linear accelerator
  radiotherapy machines, as well as new national screening programmes for bowel
  cancer. Funding for linear accelerators has also been awarded to University
  Hospitals Bristol as part of this programme
• Better
  access to GP services
  – with every area of the country benefiting from
  extended opening in the evenings and weekends
• More
  options for urgent and emergency care
  – New Urgent Treatment Centres will
  be rolled out across the country, and a beefed up NHS 111 service – with more
  access to clinical advice – will help ease pressure on A&Es, where GPs and
  mental health professionals will be stationed to help divert patients to more appropriate
  care

Dr Caroline Gamlin, Medical Director for NHS England in the
South West, said:

“This announcement sets out how services will be improved
for patients over the next two years, whether it’s better access to family
doctors, cancer treatment or mental health care.

“We’ll be working closely with local health and care leaders
and frontline staff as they now work in partnership to deliver on the
priorities that patients and members of the public have told us matter.”

The national plan – Next
Steps On The NHS Five Year Forward View – sets out the imperative to break
down barriers between NHS organisations and wrap services around patients. It
describes how learning from the 50 ‘vanguard’ projects across England –
including those at Yeovil and South Devon and Torbay – will be adopted by
Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships to provide better care for older
people by bringing together services provided by GPs, hospitals, therapists,
nurses and care staff, cutting emergency admissions and time spent in
hospitals.

The plan also sets out how national and local bodies will
take action to increase efficiency and tackle waste to make money invested in
the NHS go further in delivering the services and staff that patients want,
including the latest treatments and technology.

Launching the Delivery Plan, NHS England Chief Executive
Simon Stevens said:

“Heading into our 70th year, public support for the NHS is
as strong as ever but so too are the pressures on our frontline staff.

“Today we chart a course for practical care improvements for
the next few years. We do not underestimate the challenges but, get these
right, and patients, staff and the tax-paying public will notice the benefits.

“The document outlines significant progress made over the
last three years, including record high cancer survival rates, 8,000 extra
doctors and nurses, the first ever waiting time standards for mental health treatment
being introduced and met, and cutting waste – in particular agency staffing
bills.

“It also, however, frankly sets out where progress has not
been as quick, with rising pressure on A&E and acute wards partly caused by
delayed transfers of care.”

Katherine Murphy, Chief Executive of the Patients
Association, said:

“We welcome this delivery plan, and will work with NHS
England to ensure it is delivered successfully and engages with patients
nationally and locally.

“This is essential both to ensure that the importance of
change is understood by everyone, and to get input from patients about how new
and re-designed services can meet their needs.

“We call on decision-makers nationally and locally to
support this process, to ensure that NHS services work well for patients now
and in the future.”