Lincs NHS Trust teams up with charity to support more people with mental ill health to get into work

Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LPFT) has teamed up with the Centre for Mental Health to provide Making Individual Placement Service (IPS) Work - a programme to support people recovering from mental ill health to gain employment.

The countywide programme, which started in January, aims to help at least 120 people to improve their employability.

Trust lead occupational therapist, Jane Tuxworth, said: “We are delighted to have been chosen by the Centre for Mental Health to participate in Making IPS Work in Lincolnshire.

“This programme will enhance the paid employment, volunteering and education support we already provide to people with long term mental health problems and we have set ourselves a target of getting 60 people into paid work within the first year.”

The Department of Health-funded project will provide training for new employment specialists and clinical teams, which will in turn support people into employment of their choice. This includes job seeking support, practical support such as managing travel to work, helping individuals manage their symptoms when returning to work and ongoing support in the workplace.

Scaling Up Improvement
The IPS launch comes in the same week that a team led by Sami Timimi from LPFT was selected by the Health Foundation to be part of its new £3.5 million improvement programme - Scaling Up Improvement.

The Scaling Up Improvement programme is supporting 7 healthcare projects in the UK with the aim of improving healthcare delivery and/or the way people manage their own care through the delivery of successful health care improvement interventions at scale.

The initiative from LPFT will involve disseminating a whole service model, Outcomes Orientated Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (OO-CAMHS), through working in partnership with eight UK CAMHS teams in order to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, safety, patient-centredness and equitability of their services. Over the course of the programme each project team will take healthcare ideas, interventions and approaches that have been tested and shown to improve care at a small scale and deliver them at a larger scale.

Prof Timimi said: “There is a quiet revolution taking place in the delivery of mental health care. For too long services have been operating using approaches that match treatment to diagnosis rather than tailoring treatment to each patient’s and families’ unique circumstances and choice. We are delighted that the Health Foundation has recognised our local service transformation project that builds on patient voice and choice, as an approach that is of national significance for improving the mental health care of young people.”

The programme will run for two and a half years and each project will receive up to £500,000 of funding to support the implementation and evaluation of the work.

To find out more about both IPS and OO-CAMHS visit www.lpft.nhs.uk