Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Some of the key operational issues identified by the client included: the ways in which beds are organised and managed; the balance of inpatient and community services; and the physical locations of services across the local geography.

We worked with both provider and commissioners to undertake a comprehensive review of mental health services, combining meaningful stakeholder engagement along with our unique mental health simulation modelling approach. We developed a series of scenarios on the future pattern and delivery of services and tested these out in multi-agency workshops.

The scenarios we modelled were:

1. Reduction in Delayed Transfers of Care (DToC);
2. Development of alternatives to admission including a Psychiatric Decision Unit (PDU);
3. Standardising inpatient length of stay profiles;
4. Reducing acute readmissions;
5. Delivery of CRHT Core Fidelity Standards;
6. Reduction of inappropriate CRHT contacts;
7. Standardisation of CMHT activity; and
8. Enhanced gatekeeping of CMHT caseload.

We agreed and modelled targets for enhanced patterns of performance and delivery in the above areas and then combined these into an eventual ‘optimised model’ of mental health delivery over the coming years.