National Concordat
National actions
The Mental Health Crisis Care Concordat is a national agreement between services and agencies involved in the care and support of people in crisis. It sets out how organisations will work together better to make sure that people get the help they need when they are having a mental health crisis. Read more.
In February 2014, many of the national partners also set out specific actions they would take. These are set out in the Annex to the Concordat document.
A year on, in 2015, the Steering Group of national partners agreed an updated plan which sets out the progress that had been made against each of their actions.
The Steering Group agreed a second set of national actions in October 2016.
National summits
The Crisis Care Concordat national summits are full-day programmes celebrating progress and improving practice.
The report of the 2014 national summit can be found here.
The 2015 national summit was held on 24 November. The focus was on what more we can all do to ensure that people of all ages who experience mental health crisis receive appropriate, timely and urgent care and support. The report of the 2015 national summit can be found here and photographs from the event are here.
The 2016 national summit was held on 25 October 2016 and a report of the day published here shortly. Presentations from the day are available here.
Problem solving workshops, July 2016
In July, the Crisis Care Concordat co-hosted two problem solving workshops. The first focussed on emergency care pathways and was hosted by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. The second focussed on alternatives to admission, was hosted by the Royal College of Psychiatry and held at the Department of Health, Richmond House.
Events were attended by over 80 representatives across agencies involved in the care of people experiencing mental health crisis including Commissioners, emergency medics, psychiatric liaison team members, people with lived experience of crisis care, Trust Clinical Directors, GPs, AMHPs, carers, Social Care leads, Police, ambulance team members and paramedics. All contributed greatly to fruitful discussions around some of the current key issues in crisis care.
A summary of these discussions will be produced shortly and made available on this site. In the meantime, we wanted to share the excellent presentations that were delivered on the day covering topics such as information sharing, places of safety, effective patient monitoring, improving the safety of people under the care of Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams, and handover protocols.
Evaluation
In May 2014, Mind commissioned the McPin Foundation, a mental health research charity, to complete an evaluation of the local implementation of the Crisis Care Concordat. Using a combination of case studies in four local areas, and analysis of the Concordat Action Plans, routinely collected data and surveys with service users and carers, the evaluation aims to:
- Assess the progress and impact of rolling out the crisis declarations at a local level
- Develop an understanding of the factors for success as well as the major challenges and obstacles for local areas in signing up to and embedding agreements into their working practices and protocols
- Produce learning and recommendations for how local partners can work together effectively to improve the experience of people in mental health crisis.
The case studies began with observations of a number of meetings in the four areas chosen – London, the Wirral, Gloucestershire, and Cambridgeshire – allowing the evaluation team to identify key themes, for example the challenges and opportunities in partnership working. Another theme was ‘co-production’, or the extent to which people receiving or potentially receiving care in a mental health crisis were involved in the local implementation of the concordat. These themes are currently being followed up in a series of interviews with those involved in developing and implementing the Action Plans. The McPin Foundation are also undertaking an analysis of the Action Plans from across England, identifying among other things areas of innovation and again the involvement of service users and carers in the development of crisis care.
Another important part of the evaluation is to gather the views and experiences of service users and carers. The first of two surveys was undertaken during October and November 2014, primarily online, and provided 399 responses from people with personal experience of a mental health crisis and 153 responses from family or carers of someone with experience of a mental health crisis. The McPin Foundation repeated the survey in 2015, and as before it was advertised through our website, Facebook and twitter.