Junior health minister Paul Boateng has pledged to publish the government's long-awaited mental health strategy 'in the summer' after lobbying from mental health pressure groups across the policy spectrum.

The move came in response to a report from the Independent Reference Group, set up by ministers to advise on mental health issues, which called for a national system of 24-hour crisis intervention services.

Mr Boateng welcomed the recommendations and said they would contribute to the new strategy. 'Our strategy will be based on a rigorous analysis of what works and delivers our objectives,' he promised.

A leaked draft of the mental health strategy, reported by the Journal last month (News and News Focus, 30 April), provoked an angry response from mental health pressure groups which felt excluded from policy making.

The draft suggested NHS mental health services would get an extra pounds50m a year for 10 years as a result of the government's comprehensive spending review, and said the first aim should be to 'protect the public'.

The day after Mr Boateng's pledge, Martin Brown, head of mental health and learning disabilities at the NHS Executive, came close to apologising to health service managers for ministers' claims that community care had failed.

'You will feel that this somehow undervalues what you have been doing and says you'd better stop,' he told a Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health conference.

'This is about a government that listens to the public and to the press, and this is what the papers and the public are telling us.

'The work you're doing is extremely important. Although ministers say care in the community has failed, they have also said there will be no return to the large-scale asylums.'

Mr Brown said guidance due to come out this summer on The New NHS white paper would give more detail on the shape of mental health services.

'Because there's no national template, I can envisage a situation where, in some areas, primary care teams will run all mental health services,' said Mr Brown.

'For some places there will need to be specialist services because of morbidity and the complexity of cases, in others there will be aggregations that look like a community trust,' he said.

See News Focus, page 14.

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