Brent Mental health project: Current Service directories and referral pathways

Tags: Guidance

18th November 2021

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Current Service directories and referral pathways

The following documents have been shared with me or I have come across. Where documents are not available on line I have stored electronically (on Locality Matters’ MS One Drive).

1. Brent Mental Health services booklet

“Taking Care of your Mental Health and Wellbeing”

Booklet and service directory and guidance for the whole of Brent. Created in response to COVID 19. Breaks down available support by different groups:

  • General Services
  • Children and Young People
  • People with learning Disabilities
  • Adults of Working Age
  • Older People

Focus on Brent-wide services rather that specific community-based support

2. Brent Aid During COVID 19

List of useful contacts used by Social Prescribing Link Workers (SPLWs.)

This is a pretty comprehensive list of organisations that might be able to provide support, from Mutual Aid Groups to utility companies. It is a ten-page document, difficult to see how could be useful to someone unless they are using it all the time and very familiar with - such as an SPLW. Not sure if available online anywhere?

3. Brent Directory of services

This is a massively comprehensive document (103 pages) covering 100s of different services. It is relatively easy to use as the index page which breaks the documents into different sections e.g. “Housing” or “Disability” is then hyper-linked, within the document, to the different services under that heading.

  • Who owns this document?
  • Is it available online?
  • How is it kept up to date?
  • What happens if a service straddles different topic headings?

4. Brent Signposting database

This is spreadsheet, again massively comprehensive. It is made up of over 40 separate sheets / tabs each relating to a different service area - e.g. “Transport” or “Smoking”. Each sheet / tab then has details about relevant services, giving an overview of available information about different services covering:

  • Name
  • Description of service
  • Opening Hours
  • Address
  • Phone
  • Website
  • Email

The same questions apply to this resource as the one above:

  • Who owns it?
  • Is it available online?
  • How is it kept up to date?
  • What happens if a service straddles different topic headings?

Other resources

5. CNWL Mental Health Services website

This covers an enormous scope of services - from Mental Health, immunisation, Diabetes, hearing, Housing etc etc. It also covers all CNWL’s geographic footprint which is a large area (Birmingham to Brighton)

Not sure how it is kept up to date or if useful for identifying hyper-local services that could support people with say, social isolation or loneliness - seems very “service” focussed.

Also how is it kept up to date?

6. Brent Council Community Director

This is an online directory of services available to people in Brent. You enter your postcode, select the search radius (in miles), select a category (e.g. mental health or legal advice) and then pick which “Community Served?” e.g. Christian or Black and Minority Ethnic. I did not review in detail but a search for Mental Health services, within a mile of an Alperton postcode (HA0 4LY) for “All” communities came up with “sorry no items matched you search”.

Challenge with directories like this is that they are geared around support where either a.) you know what support is needed or b.) there is a clear problem you are looking to address. Aside from the deficit-based approach that it reinforces, the directory doesn’t seem to help if one is simply looking to get someone better connected into their community. For example, I ran another search, exactly the same as the first one but replacing “mental Health” with “volunteering”, from the drop down list, and got the same result “sorry no items matched you search”.

Need to understand how the database has been developed and how kept up to date. Not sure how useful for our purposes in current form?

7. Service directory from Jenny Lanyero

This document has been pulled together by Jenny Lanyero

From Jenny - “Please note the attached. It has taken longer than expected and is still not exhaustive as the service leads are on hols and I have compiled based on my limited knowledge of new service developments.”

It is a really helpful document setting out the different services that people can be referred to for support with mental health.

Need to understand:

  • Who can refer people to these services?
  • What is the referral process?
  • Given that Jenny had to develop this how can different professions (e.g. GPs) be kept up to date with these services and the referral pathways into them?

8. Commissioned Services from CCG

This is an amalgamated list from Keetha Hariharan and Sarah Nyandoro - it sets out the key organisations that are commissioned by the CCG (I think) relating to mental health services and the contact details for these organisations. It is very much Brent wide.

9. Directory from Sarah Nyandoro

10. CAHMS Pathway

SUMMARY

There is probably too much information available to people.

  • It is hard to understand how collectively you avoid duplicating effort in terms of assembling and keeping information up to date
  • There is lots of information available on line but suspect the plethora of other (off line) databases, lists and spreadsheets suggest existing information is not well used or trusted? • Difficult to see how, unless it is major part of your role (such as a SPLW), you can keep abreast of what is available and how you can refer into services
  • Critically almost all the information is structured at a Brent wide level rather than at a community level. It is mostly geared for answering - I have a person with this problem how can I help to fix it” It does not speak to a very asset based approach?
  • I have not seen anything that assembles information about the wealth of support that will be available at a community level - e.g. Church End or Alperton

For the full document with links to websites please download the attached PDF

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