CCGs and trust set up mental health partnership board

The three clinical commissioning groups in north Yorkshire and Tees, Esk and Wear Valley Foundation Trust agreed the terms of reference to set up a partnership board at the end of May.

The board will be made up of the leaders of Harrogate and Rural, Hambleton, Richmondshire and Whitby, and Scarborough and Ryedale CCGs, TEWV and North Yorkshire County Council’s director of health and adult services.

Harrogate and Rural CCG chief officer Amanda Bloor told HSJ that while the CCGs were not pooling their £80m total mental health and learning disability budgets with TEWV, it would be spent together.

Harrogate and Rural CCG is lead commissioner for the three mental health contracts with TEWV.

Ms Bloor said the board will take a strategic view of how the cash is spent and how to best support the population’s mental health and learning disability needs.

She added: “There needed to be a strategic commissioning view across the three CCGs. We have one amount of money to spend on probably the most vulnerable cohort we provide for.

“The ambition will be to think about how we look at the total around the £80m mark and how we invest that differently.

“The time we would have spent going through traditional contract management is now focused on the transformation approach, on how we think and invest differently to get the outcomes that we want.”

Ms Bloor said despite the three CCGs all expecting to end 2018-19 in deficit, they were still going to hit the mental health investment standard by raising mental health spending in line with allocation growth.

She added: “We have been clear that success would be delivering the Five Year Forward View [for Mental Health].”

TEWV chief executive Colin Martin said the first two priorities for the new board are:

• Bringing back out of area complex care patients; and
• Moving more learning disability patients back into the community under the national Transforming Care Programme.

For the learning disabilities work, the CCGs and trusts are working with Vale of York CCG and York City Council, which together make up the region’s Transforming Care Partnership.

Mr Martin told HSJ that clinicians from his trust were now working with CCG colleagues to look at both cohorts of patients and update their care packages.

Work also includes creating a new £700,000 a year forensic community learning disabilities team with an upfront investment of nearly £150,000, which is expected to go live in the autumn.

Mr Martin said: “You need to say what do these patients need, what are the housing options, how far out-of-county are they, and fundamentally, what they want, what’s their definition of recovery.”