NEWS
Mental health
St Andrew’s to overhaul services after CQC inspection Mental health provider St Andrew’s Healthcare, which had “repeated and systemic failings” in its governance, is to overhaul its current services and move out of its facility at Fitzroy House in Northampton, transferring to a smaller building, while reducing the number of young people it supports from 99 to 30.
The overhaul follows an inspection by the Care Quality Commission, which put the charity into special measures. CQC inspectors visited the charity on 23 and 24 October and found the use of physical restraint had increased, despite plans to reduce it. Inspectors also found staff were not always forthcoming in raising
concerns without fear of reprisal. In the report which followed the inspection, CQC told St Andrews Healthcare that if its service fails to improve within six months, it will close it down. Chief executive of St Andrew’s Healthcare, Katie Fisher, said: “We have already taken disciplinary
action against the small number of staff members in our child and adolescent mental health service whose treatment of our patients is completely unacceptable. There is no excuse for this behaviour, and for this we are sorry. We know we need to make significant changes, and quickly.”
The Priory Group opens new wellbeing centre in Bristol The Priory Group has opened a walk-in Wellbeing Centre in Bristol to meet increasing demand for mental health services in South West England. The Wellbeing Centre, located in Aztec West Business Park, close to Priory’s Bristol Hospital, is fully regulated by the Care Quality Commission. The centre is staffed by consultant psychiatrists, psychologists and a range of individual, group and family therapists, providing therapy and treatments for a broad range of mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, stress, eating
disorders, addiction, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as well as bereavement and grief. It is hoped the new service will help to ease the pressures on local A&E teams, after University Hospitals Bristol NHS Trust reported that visits to emergency departments for mental health issues in the Bristol area had increased by 138% on the previous year, rising from 1095 to 2610. This opening of the Bristol Wellbeing Centre is the latest in a series of Wellbeing Centres launched by the Priory Group, in Birmingham, Southampton, Canterbury, Aberdeen, Edinburgh,
Greater Manchester, Oxford and London (Fenchurch Street and Harley Street). Mandy Ryan, manager of the Bristol Wellbeing Centre, said: “At the start of this new decade, our team is so proud to be opening this much needed clinic to allow swift assessment and treatment of people in Bristol and across the South West, where there has been a gap for patients for some time. She added: “Our ethos has always been to promote the importance of early assessment and diagnosis. We hope that by offering a friendly and discreet service that is accessible and
convenient, we can play an active part in supporting all our patients towards a better quality of life and long-term recovery.” Leanne Hayward, consultant psychiatrist at Priory’s Bristol Hospital and the Wellbeing Centre, commented: “The Wellbeing Centre will meet much needed demand in the Bristol area. Those with mental health conditions need to receive the right treatment as soon as possible, and at the wellbeing centre we offer the swift and specialist support patients require. I look forward to working with patients at this excellent new service.”
Digital and medtech
myGP reaches 1.5m active users Healthcare app myGP has seen a 50% increase in active users in the past six months, with 1.5 million people across the country now using it to manage their health. myGP, developed by iPLATO Healthcare, is NHS Assured and offers users and their dependents appointment booking at their registered GP surgery, medical record access and repeat prescription ordering, medication reminders, health tracking, e-referrals and a pharmacy service finder. myGP directly codes into a practice’s clinical system meaning that all actions taken on the app are instantaneously picked up by
HealthInvestor UK • April 2020
the practice’s system. According to myGP, this provides time and cost savings for practices and also gives patients the ability to cancel appointments online, freeing up appointments for those who need them most. Due to its large user base, myGP was recently asked by the NHS to assist in communicating guidance for the current outbreak of Coronavirus. myGP chief executive Tobias Alpsten said: “This is a fantastic achievement by our supporters within the NHS and our team. It means that we continue to meet more of our user’s healthcare needs at their own registered GP surgery.
The real winners are myGP members who previously had limited options for accessing online services and we hope that by using myGP their lives will be made simpler and more convenient.” He added: “We are continuously listening to app users and practices about features that would help them
in their day-to-day lives and continue to build these into the myGP app. We regularly get fantastic feedback from both practices and patients and our local account managers continue to work directly with practices to help them to help patients to adopt digital tools. It’s great to see that this is working.”
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