Mental health trust “not too big” say NHS chiefs
Hampshire health leaders have moved to allay concerns that a planned new county-wide mental health trust could be “too big” to offer effective care.
The Project Fusion merger planned by the Solent, Southern Health, Isle of Wight and Sussex Partnership NHS trusts, is well advanced with a full business case due to be submitted to regulators at the end of the year, writes Josh Wright of the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
But Cllr Judith Smyth, a former Southern Health board member, urged people overseeing this work to make sure the new organisation could respond to local requirements.
‘We need to be really careful and watch the figures and have some way of monitoring, because Southern Health, one could argue, was too big to provide a unified service across the patch,” she said at a meeting of the Portsmouth health scrutiny committee.
“To create an even bigger trust when so many of the community health services rely on local relationships that can tweak the model and challenge standards…you have to make sure you are looking at outcomes. Frankly, Southern Health was too big; I’m a bit worried this is too big.”
Ahead of their planned merger, the four existing trusts are in the middle of a six-week staff consultation before final plans are put together.
The creation of the new trust to manage all mental health and learning disability services in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight has been supported by the county’s integrated care board.
Alasdair Snell, the chief operating officer for Solent NHS Trust, said there was “an awful lot of work” going on to complete the merger by the start of April.
“We absolutely recognise the importance of place – that different cities and demographics require different levels of service, and we’ve seen over the years that the cities invest a different amount of money into different specialisms for that reason,” he said at Thursday’s meeting.
“It could be a real positive for the system because where there is best practice we can bring that to all areas. It’s not about levelling down, it’s about levelling up where we can and learning from each other.”
He said there was unlikely to be any change to front-line mental health provision in the county “in the near future”, with the new trust instead focusing on longer term organisational projects. And there was ‘no plan’ to separate community and mental health services, he added.
