Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk – Unmet Needs Report

Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk – Unmet Needs Report

The Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk has released a report detailing the ongoing challenges and unmet needs faced by those within Norfolk and Suffolk, due to inadequate provision for those suffering mental ill health. This report, based on patient, carer and staff experiences sent to the Campaign this year, highlights the persistent issues at the Trust, impacting patients, carers and staff.

Key Findings:

• Patients and carers, unknown to each other, and from different localities within Norfolk and Suffolk have experienced very similar and very worrying points of concerning care.

• Long waiting times for treatment are meaning that individuals are finding themselves without help and therefore becoming more unwell.

• Patients in need of mental health support are finding it difficult to even access NSFT services. There is a heavy reliance on signposting to alternative provisions in the voluntary sector who are unable to meet patients’ needs.

• Carers still feel excluded from their loved ones’ care and are experiencing stress and poor mental health themselves from trying to support their loved one but not being heard by the services.

• Even when in a service, patients’ and carers’ experience of care is poor: communication was the main concern and inappropriate reactions to risk were second.

• Staff remain concerned about the Trust and feel they cannot provide the best care possible to the patients in their care.

• Resourcing at the Trust is continuing to directly impact patient, carer and staff experience.

The Campaign, established in 2013 following drastic cuts to local mental health services, has been vigilantly monitoring the situation at Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trust for over a decade. Through monthly meetings with patients, carers, staff, and the public, we have consistently heard concerns about inadequate psychiatric bed availability, insufficient crisis provision, lengthy waiting times, and difficulties in accessing appropriate treatment. Despite numerous promises and deadlines set by the Trust to address these issues, this report reveals that many of these problems are still present, and perhaps, worse, in terms of the impact they are having on people. Of particular concern is the ongoing bed crisis, which has led to patients being sent out of the area for treatment, sometimes hundreds of miles away from their homes and support networks, and the difficulty in accessing suitable services due to threshold and demand.

The report also highlights the impact of financial difficulties and budget cuts on service provision. Long waiting times for community treatment, poor crisis services, and a system struggling to cope is leaving many people without the help they desperately need, and placing mounting pressure on carers fighting to keep their loved ones safe.

Support services, including the crisis team, have failed to protect or care for [my relative] over the past 18 months, resulting in [my relative’s] admission to hospital. There have been catastrophic lapses in services, with no communication, resulting in monthly suicide attempts.
Carer Experience

We decided to formalise our findings in this report because, month after month, we hear from distressed individuals and carers who are either not receiving services they should be or are under services that are not meeting their needs. It’s crucial to highlight the level of unmet need in Norfolk and Suffolk, as these issues are compromising people’s health and safety.
The Campaign Committee

The report includes testimonies from patients, carers, and staff, providing a picture of the challenges faced by those interacting with NSFT services. It also incorporates information from media reports, regulatory bodies, and other published reports to contextualise these experiences – ones that are often deemed as subjective by those with power.

I believe my referral was urgent, but we found ourselves waiting around for several weeks afterwards and I only received an appointment after me and my mother were able to contact the service to complain.
Service User experience

The Campaign hopes that this report will serve as a wake-up call to the whole system. We continue to call for immediate action to address the unmet needs in mental health services across Norfolk and Suffolk, emphasising the importance of putting patient and carer voices at the heart of any improvement plans. We also continue to call for an Independent Statutory Public Inquiry, to recognise and acknowledge the allowed length of failings and the damage caused in the past, which undoubtedly will affect the present and future efforts of the Trust.

Mark Harrison, Chair of the Campaign said:

The responsibility for failing mental health services in Norfolk and Suffolk has now passed to the new Labour Ministers for health and mental health.  We are calling on Wes Streeting to meet his statutory duties and provide good quality mental health support.  The coroners in Norfolk and Suffolk have issued two Prevention of Future Deaths (PFD) notices this year to the Minister citing lack of beds as the cause of unnecessary deaths.  They have also issued PFDs to NSFT for unsafe services.  NSFT is having to make £17m cuts to its budget this financial year due to austerity cuts inherited from the previous Conservative Government.  We are demanding these cuts be cancelled by the Government and an investment is made to bring the number of beds and services up to standard.

The deaths crisis in NSFT has its roots in austerity and the cuts made by the Coalition Government 2010-15 and a radical redesign of mental health services in response to cuts back in 2013/14.  The campaign to save mental health services in Norfolk and Suffolk has been campaigning for nearly 11 years as we predicted that these cuts would result in a deaths crisis as the deepest cuts were made to the services that supported the people in most mental distress and those with dual diagnoses.  They closed beds, they closed the assertive outreach and homelessness teams, broke up the crisis team and took mental health support out of GP surgeries. 

In April 2022, NSFT was rated ‘inadequate’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) for a fourth time and campaigners stated that there had been over 1,000 unexpected deaths since 2013. NSFT said they ‘did not recognise’ that figure.  Clive Lewis MP raised this in Parliament. We presented our concerns to a group of MPs, including the then Minister Gillian Keegan, in July 2022. We said that NSFT had ‘lost count’ of deaths because their systems, processes and governance were inadequate, and that reporting of deaths to the board and external bodies showed inconsistencies and gaps in data. Subsequent closer examination by campaigners of the documents in the public domain suggested that 1,000 figure was an underestimate, and we identified at least 2,600 deaths. However, in response to concerns the ICBs commissioned auditors Grant Thornton to investigate these figures.  What they found is truly staggering.

The two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk are mainly rural counties and combined have a population of just under 1.7m people.  They refer to a catastrophic 8,440 deaths in 3.5 years between April 2019 and October 2022, all of whom were either under the care of the Trust or had been up to six months before they died.  They also revealed that NSFT had “lost track of patient deaths.”  So, 11 years on from the radical redesign it has now turned into the largest deaths crisis in the history of the NHS.

The Campaign was so concerned at the continuing rise in deaths and repeated patterns from previous PFDs that in December 2023 we wrote to the Chief Constables of Norfolk and Suffolk asking them to investigate and prosecute the deaths at NSFT, including making an assessment if the threshold for a charge of corporate manslaughter has been reached. Following a makeover by PR consultants Hood and Woolf, costing £800k of public money, the CQC rated NSFT as “Requires Improvement” in February 2023, although they remain in Special Measures. The campaign has evidence that services have further deteriorated since the last CQC inspection. 

The campaign has been invited by Jack Abbott MP for Ipswich to meet him in Westminster along with new MPs in Suffolk and Norfolk and the Minster for Mental Health, Baroness Merron on November 25.

The Campaign to Save Mental Health Services in Norfolk and Suffolk

A report of overlapping failures and unmet need within the care and treatment at Norfolk and Suffolk Foundation Trusts using patient and care experience’ October 2024

Access the report on the home page at norfolksuffolkmentalhealtcrisis.org.uk/

For more information please contact:
Campaign chair, Mark Harrison
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://norfolksuffolkmentalhealthcrisis.org.uk