Making your voice heard : Community mental health
“I have to wait for a callback, that doesn’t always happen”
We listened to their feedback about using the community mental health service in Medway and talked to them about what could be improved.
We heard 3 key themes:
- Most people felt involved in their care. Peoples’ feedback is being actively gathered, listened to and acted upon.
- Telephone calls were not always answered in an efficient manner.
- People told us that they hadn’t found the mental health crisis service to be helpful when they needed it.
We’ve made several recommendations including all patients should be involved in the planning of their care and all should have a care plan.
We published all our findings and worked with colleagues at Healthwatch Kent who had also visited a range of community mental health services to take our collective findings to the mental health trust.
“I was suicidal but couldn’t get through to them”
We also took our joint findings to the Medway Mental Health Action Group where we discussed our recommendations and next steps with both professionals and patients. We’ll continue to monitor the feedback we hear about community mental health and work with organisations to improve the service.
What have we got up to?
If you'd like to find out what else we got involved in between January and March this year, check out our latest annual report!
