Expanding partnership working for better value and outcomes

Mental health trusts have been working with local partners to meet the needs of as many individuals in their local areas in the best way possible. This includes through NHS-led mental health, learning disability and autism provider collaboratives, to improve the delivery of specialised services at scale.  

NHS trusts leaders and other stakeholders have highlighted the particularly important role of the VCSE sector in meeting patients’ needs and delivering value. For example, support being offered to children in primary schools through programmes like myHappymind, has been highlighted by trust leaders as particularly impressive. Some trusts have fostered successful, long-term partnerships with the third sector or are partnering with the VCSE sector in new, effective ways, which have helped to better meet local need and address mental health workforce challenges and should be shared for others to learn from and replicate. Stakeholders and trust leaders agree more generally there is good practice being delivered in lots of places, either within the NHS or by other partners, which the sector needs to harness and support its spread and adoption. 

However, the significant financial challenges facing local authorities are having a detrimental impact on the third sector, and in turn on the prevention and early intervention services they often lead on the provision of locally. There is also a need to move away from short term, insecure grants-based funding and transactional commissioning of the VCSE sector to a more relational and outcomes based, multi-year approach. In considering the mental health workforce, stakeholders have stressed the importance of this including social workers as well as staff from the VCSE sector. The shift towards prevention requires a skilled and integrated social work workforce who can support care and treatment plans and ongoing prevention. Local authorities and trusts want to recruit mental health social workers, but are having to disinvest due to constrained finances.  

Better partnership working and co-production between trusts and local authorities has also been highlighted as key. This would particularly help the vulnerable children who are currently falling between the gaps of education, local authority and NHS funded services. There also needs to be further focus on building and sustaining strong relationships between the mental health sector and primary care, as there is significant variation in how effectively secondary and primary care services are working together to meet mental health needs. This inconsistency is partly due to funding limitations and partly due to local relationships between trusts and general practices. It takes significant time and work to build the trust between partners required to work effectively in partnership, and policy ambitions need to recognise their importance and support their development, and sustain existing alliances where they are already working successfully. 

To enable effective partnership work and realise the value it generates, we need to: