Cheshire and Merseyside mental health providers were selected to become a wave 2 site for the new models of care programme in relation to low and medium secure mental health services. The Prospect Partnership comprises three NHS and two independent sector providers who will work together to implement a new model of secure mental health care in Cheshire and Merseyside.
The programme gives local clinicians and managers greater control of clinical decision making and financial flows with the aim of:
- Reducing the length of inpatient stays
- Improving community care and support available locally
- Eliminating clinically unnecessary out-of-area placements
NHS providers are our Trust, Mersey Care, and Cheshire and Wirral Partnership. Independent sector providers are Elysium Healthcare and Cygnet Healthcare.
We want people to stay in secure care only for as long as they need to. Therefore we want to be able to deliver more care in the community so people can be discharged quicker. We want to see benefits for service users and staff.
How will we achieve this?
By working collectively as a whole system, rather than individual organisations, to improve service user's journey through secure care. This will make the pathway more efficient and improve service user experience. We have developed a standardised and agreed model of care that is based on the Prospect '4D Test'. This means any changes implemented as a result Prospect activity will eradicate one of the following:
We have secured national funding in order to develop our community forensic offer in line with the national model. This will create new and additional capacity and we are in the early stages of implementing this. We have also worked with local authorities and clinical commissioning groups across Cheshire and Merseyside to help us design what the offer should be.
Prospect went live as a new care model on 1 July 2019 and we are working on our implementation plan to deliver changes to our referral, assessment and clinical processes across the partnership. This will be done incrementally and we will keep you updated as work progresses.
For further information, please email: prospect@merseycare.nhs.uk