Community Mental Health Support Services Consultation

Overview

Norfolk County Council, in partnership with health and district councils, funds housing related floating support services to support adults with mental health needs in Norfolk to live independently in their own homes. Floating support services are services which are provided to the person wherever they live. They can move with the person if they move home and are not attached to a property.

At the moment, there are three services that provide a broad range of support that helps people to live in their own homes and help make sure that they do not lose their homes. These are:

- A Floating Support (FS) Service that provides housing related support to people in their own home for on average up to 2 years. Housing related support helps people develop independent living skills, keep safe and well, provides advice and information about paying bills and looking after the home and helps people to get involved in the local communities.
 

- A number of Hospital Link Workers who support people who are in the acute wards in mental health hospitals or with the Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust (NSFT) Crisis Response and Home Treatment teams. They provide housing related support to help make sure that people do not lose their home when they are in hospital and that they have the right benefits. This provides short term input of up to 3 months on average, with service users who need longer term support and problem resolution being passed to the floating support service.

- A Norwich only service (Active Outreach) which works alongside the NSFT assertive outreach service to meet the needs of people who don’t engage with health and social care services and who often have a dual diagnosis. Service users remain with the service for significant periods of time.
 

The contracts for these services are coming to an end and the plan is to re-model these and ask organisations to apply to run the new services – this is called a tender. The new services will be in place early in 2014.
 

Why your views matter

We are planning to remodel these services into two separate but related services operating across Norfolk :

• The first service will provide a low level housing related support service to help people to be independent in their own homes or move on to greater independence. This service will support each person for up to two years.

• The second service will provide a housing related support service for people with more complex needs and/or who need intensive support. The level of service will vary in line with people’s needs and the service will work closely with NSFT staff. This service will include the work of the Hospital Link Workers and the Active Outreach Service.

 
Both services will be available in all parts of Norfolk and will support people with mental health needs.
 

We have  already worked with a range of people to develop the specification for the two services including:
• people with mental health needs and carers.
• staff from housing authorities, Probation, Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust, Norfolk County Council Community services.
• providers of support services to people with mental health needs  

This consultation is to check if there is support for some of the ideas and to make sure we have not missed anything really important.
 

What happens next

We will take comments into account in finalising the specification. The service will go out to tender to interested providers later in July 2013, and the specification is part of the tender. Some of the comments may be included in more detailed work we will be doing to do to make sure that the change over from current services to the new model goes smoothly.