CM Mental Health

Secretary of state for Health, Jeremy Hunt announced details of a £90m package to improve dementia diagnosis in the UK and ensure two thirds of sufferers are diagnosed within six weeks by March 2015. In some areas it can take up to 25 weeks for a dementia diagnosis to be made.

Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) and how they should be used under the Mental Health Act are still not fully understood or implemented consistently across health and social care services according to the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Mental health patients are set to be able to choose where they receive care following measures announced last month by Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, or rather re-iterated, since the main measures were first announced a year ago

Failure to plan for the long-term needs of adults with learning disabilities is increasing costs for councils according to a study by learning disability charity FitzRoy.

The Department of Health (DH) has set out five new priorities for the care of people with learning disabilities in its latest response to the Winterbourne View scandal (CCMn July 2011). In its report Winterbourne View: Transforming Care One Year On, care minister Norman Lamb re-states the government’s commitment to ensure that individuals have moved or are moving to settings closer to family by June 2014.

The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) fourth report into the Mental Health Act reported that access to crisis care in hospitals remained inadequate, with some facilities not being staffed and service users being taken to the police instead.

The Department of Health (DH) has set out five new priorities for the care of people with learning disabilities in its latest response to the Winterbourne View scandal (CCMn July 2011).

Children in care will now be able to stay with their foster families after they turn 18 following a £40m funding boost and a new legal duty on councils to provide support. Children and families minister, Edward Timpson, announced this month that he is placing a new legal duty on local authorities to provide financial support for every young person who wants to stay with their foster parents until their 21st birthday - giving local authorities £40m over the next three years to put the support arrangements in place.

Average weekly fees for specialist care homes for people with long-term physical and learning disabilities dropped by 4.2% during the course of 2012 to £1,462 per week at the end of the year, according to Colliers International, and this trend is set to continue with a 2.6% drop identified in the first half of 2013 to £1,424 per week, among those surveyed by Colliers.

A new integrated dementia service, run by a consortium of 162 GPs across 41 practices in Staffordshire, has landed the top award in the NHS Innovation Challenge Prize for Dementia. The prize, run in collaboration with Janssen Healthcare Innovation, was set up this year to identify and reward innovative approaches for dementia, one of the biggest problems the NHS and UK society face today. The Dementia Challenge is part of the wider NHS Innovation Challenge Prizes programme and also the Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge.