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Thursday 7 March 2024
Foreword from Jinjer Kandola MBE,
Chief Executive of the North London Mental Health Partnership
Welcome to the first edition of our newsletter for external stakeholders from the North London Mental Health Partnership, made up of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust.
We are the main provider of NHS mental health services across North London. Our Vision is “Better Mental Health, Better Lives, Better Communities” and everything we do is about improving the mental health of local people and supporting our staff to provide consistently high quality, compassionate care. We hope you enjoy reading about the work we are doing to provide the very best mental health care across North London.
In this newsletter, we'll be sharing news about the opening of our new buildings at Highgate East and Lowther Road; the appointment of our new Chair, Lena Samuels; and a new permanent home for our Mental Health Crisis Assessment Service. There is also exciting news about a pioneering initiative we are leading on to avoid people in mental health crisis ending up inappropriately in A&E.
Last, but not least, we will be explaining why 2024 will be a very significant year for us as we come together to form a new Trust in October, serving all five boroughs across North London!
Please click here to subscribe to this newsletter regularly. Please also share it with anyone else who might be interested in reading about our work.
With my best wishes
Jinjer Kandola MBE
Chief Executive
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Introducing our new Chair, Lena Samuels
We are delighted to introduce our new Chair, Lena Samuels. Lena took up her role here on 4 December, and is also the Chair of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board (ICB). She will remain in that role, alongside her new one at our Partnership.
We also want to thank our previous Interim Chair,
Peter Molyneux, whose term ended at the end of November. Peter made a significant contribution in leading the development of the North London Mental Health Partnership, including the development of our Partnership Strategy, and we wish him well for the future.
Lena began her career as a lecturer in further and higher education and managed a training centre in London for young people at risk of exclusion. She has held a number of leadership roles across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
Outside of her work in the NHS, Lena runs a company which has provided communications and training in leadership, human rights and child protection on behalf of organisations such as the National Crime Agency, UNICEF and UN Women. In addition, Lena is a Deputy Lieutenant at Hampshire Lieutenancy.
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Transforming where and how we deliver our care
New Highgate East mental health inpatient building
We are delighted that we will be opening two fantastic new buildings over the next few weeks which will transform the quality of care we provide and the environments our staff work in.
Next week, our new, state-of-the-art, flagship mental health inpatient building (pictured below) at Highgate East opens, next to the Whittington Hospital.
It replaces our ageing wards at St Pancras and will support mental health recovery with wonderful therapeutic spaces for our service users. It will also give our staff the facilities they need to provide the best possible care.
Highgate East has 78 single en suite bedrooms and there is accessible outdoor green space on each ward. It will be a major part of an enlarged clinical campus at Highgate with our existing Highgate Mental Health Centre (Highgate West), just across the road.
BBC London filmed at Highgate East last week, interviewing our Chief Medical Officer, Vincent Kirchner, and a service user – you can read the full story here.
We were delighted, recently, to welcome Councillor Anna Wright, (bottom centre photograph), Cabinet Member for Health, Wellbeing and Adult Social Care at Camden Council, for a visit to Highgate East. Last Friday, some of our senior colleagues, (pictured below), including our Chair, Lena Samuels, and Chief Executive, Jinjer Kandola, enjoyed a tour of the amazing new facilities.
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 New home for our Mental Health Crisis Assessment Service (MHCAS)
Our MHCAS service has been offering 24/7 emergency care for local people suffering a mental health crisis since 2020. Our Crisis Assessment Service provides specialist mental health care for people in a dedicated environment, tailored specifically to their needs and avoids them having to go to an Accident and Emergency Department, which is often not appropriate.
Feedback from our service users and our partners has been that this service is making a real impact in improving care and we are thrilled that our pioneering service is now being replicated elsewhere. We are also very pleased that the service will soon be getting a new, purpose-built home as part of our improved Highgate Mental Health Campus from April 2024.
Lowther Road
Our new community mental health facilities at Lowther Road in Islington are also due to open in the next few weeks. The purpose-built design will provide a welcoming environment for our service users, as well as a modern workplace for our clinical teams. The building has been future-proofed so that we can adapt it to accommodate a range of different services as needs change. Importantly, a new community café in the building will make the centre somewhere everyone can use and enjoy, helping to break down the stigma sometimes associated with mental health.
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How coming together as a new Trust will improve patient care
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Last year, we developed our new North London Mental Health Partnership Strategy, with significant input from service users, carers, staff, our partners and our wider communities. This sets out our priorities for the next five years. Thank you again to all those who contributed to the development of our Partnership Strategy and if you have not seen it, it is available here. While developing our Strategy, many stakeholders asked for clarity on the next steps in the development of our Partnership.
We undertook a process to formally review how we can deliver our Strategy most effectively and how we best address the significant challenges we face over the coming years.
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Last July, it was agreed that formally coming together to create one new Trust is the best way of achieving these.
This decision built on what we have been doing over the last two to three years, with a single Chair and Chief Executive since 2021 and a single Partnership Executive Team since June 2022. We now propose to come together formally to create a new Trust in October this year, to be known as the ‘North London NHS Foundation Trust’.
We believe coming together into one new Trust, taking the best from each, will help us deliver our Strategy and address the challenges we face more effectively, and is therefore best for our service users, our staff and local communities.
As a new Trust, we will be able to do more and use our staff, our financial resources and our buildings more effectively to help us address the increasing demands on our services, the challenges in recruiting and retaining staff and meet the expectations of our service users and local communities.
Our new Trust is the best way to help us:
1) Ensure that no matter where you live, care is delivered as close as possible to your home, with shorter waiting times and in a way that really supports your needs
2) Change the way we deliver our services to respond more effectively to an ever- growing population that is living much longer
3) Ensure we can provide care 24/7 for when people are in mental health crisis
4) Direct our resources to the areas of greatest need, in order to improve our performance and the care we give, and
5) Make our new Trust a fantastic place to work and to develop skills so that we recruit and retain the very best staff.
Next steps on our journey to become a new Trust
We will submit our plans for our new Trust to NHS England in June 2024 for review before they make a recommendation to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. All being well, and subject to approvals, our new Trust will formally come into being on 1 October this year!
This is a really exciting time for us and we will continue to update you in this regular newsletter about our plans to provide even better mental health care for local people.
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Update on our ground-breaking Section 136 pilot
We are one of only two pilots in London - the other in south London - working on a pioneering initiative to provide expert advice and timely support for people in mental health crisis, working with the Metropolitan Police.
Our Crisis Hub, based at St Ann's Hospital in Haringey, has a dedicated telephone line for police officers, with specially-trained mental health staff available around the clock to offer police officers guidance on whether to detain someone under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act. Early results show that it is already helping minimise unnecessary Accident and Emergency Department attendances and reducing detentions under the Mental Health Act.
As well as ensuring that people in a mental health crisis get the right care quickly, our pilot is helping to reduce health inequalities, through reducing the disproportionate numbers of Section 136 detentions currently experienced by Asian and Black mental health service users, compared to White patients.
Our Section 136 pilot in our Crisis Hub forms part of our ongoing work with police colleagues to improve the support for people experiencing mental health crisis and is linked to the Right Care, Right Person initiative being implemented by the NHS and police across London.
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Thank you
We hope you have enjoyed reading this first external stakeholder newsletter and we will be in touch again next month. If you have any questions or suggestions for future topics, please email: beh-tr.communications@nhs.net
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