Mental Health Together launches in Thanet

A new community mental health service called Mental Health Together is available to people in Thanet from Monday 15 January.

The new service, developed with people who have relevant lived experience, brings together a wide range of partners to provide a truly joined-up service.  

It means organisations including charity partners, Porchlight and Shaw Trust, as well as Invicta Health, will be working collaboratively with NHS services to improve the way someone is supported with their mental health needs.

This is important as mental health can be impacted by a number of things in someone’s life. Mental Health Together is designed to ensure mental health, physical health, and social aspects – such as debt, employment or housing needs - are supported within one care plan. This ensures people get joined-up care, without having to navigate their way around different services or completing multiple assessments.

Mental Health Together offers a range of new ways to help people, including lived experience-led workshops and trauma-informed psychological programmes. It also provides help to families and carers who are supporting someone with serious mental health needs.

Clinical Director of Community Health Transformation, Dr James Osborne, says: “This is such a vital service. Mental Health Together is our new way of delivering mental health services for people with severe and complex mental health problems who are being cared for in the community.

“For the first time there is real emphasis on how different partners work together to deliver easily accessible, community mental health services in way that have never previously been achieved.”

Martyn Cheesman is the Lived Experience Lead who has worked across the Mental Health Together rollout. He says: “A community mental health team might not always be what somebody needs. It might be that they need a voluntary group that supports them through bereavement, for example, or around their personality disorder, that can support them in the long term. This new service will make it easier for them to access that help.”

Mental Health Together is part of a national transformation programme of NHS Community Mental Health Services. In Kent and Medway, it brings services together to better support people with mental health difficulties so they can live well in their communities. It means organisations, including those in the voluntary sector, that support people with their mental health work much more closely together and so improve patient experience.

All referrals, including from GPs in Thanet, will be made to the Mental Health Together team who will work collaboratively with relevant partners to create one support plan. It will also bring an end to patients having to complete multiple assessments.

Mental Health Together will roll out across the rest of Kent and Medway over the coming months.

Watch the video animation to learn more about Mental Health Together.

Find out more: KMPT | Mental Health Together or email: Mentalhealth.together@nhs.net