4 minute read
Breathing space
As work continues on Mersey Care’s new Mossley Hill mental health care facility due to open this autumn, MC Magazine meets Jeanette Murray, whose experiences have helped shape a better place for service users to rest and recover.
After a family tragedy, Jeanette has personal experience of how surroundings can impact recovery from a mental health crisis. “I had a breakdown and was in and out of hospital for a few years,” she said.
“At first, I was on a ward with six other patients, just with curtains around our beds for privacy. If you’re constantly surrounded by other people in distress, you can’t recover. You can’t sleep. You are never away from the noise and bustle and there’s no time or space to relax.”
Jeanette also struggled with the restricted outdoor space. “I felt locked in and confined. It was like not being able to breathe properly – I just needed some peace.”After a family tragedy, Jeanette has personal experience of how surroundings can impact recovery from a mental health crisis.
Engagement with service users, stakeholders and the wider public started years before the old site was cleared and they have been involved every step of the way since.
By keeping service users and staff at the heart of the design process, the new building is not only state of the art but also welcoming, homely, peaceful and healing.
Every service user at the new 80 bed facility will have their own ensuite room with access to tree lined gardens and professional on site services including psychology, psychiatry, speech and language and occupational therapy, a pharmacy and urgent care.
For Jeanette, the light and airy therapeutic spaces which have been created for activities, socialising and eating together are just as important for recovery. “It means people have freedom – you have the privacy and dignity of your own room but you can choose to be with others if you need company.”
Jeanette, together with other service users, has been involved in every conversation with the architects and doctors to give a service user’s perspective on the way the whole building is designedfrom the garden layout to the colours on the walls.
“The new facility is beautiful, especially the outdoor spaces. It gives everyone a chance to get closer to nature in a relaxing, peaceful place. We all need to be able to do that.”
Rob Collins, Mersey Care’s Chief Finance Officer, is clear that working with Jeanette and other service users with lived experience of mental health has been key to the project’s success. He said, “Mossley Hill is the latest in a series of new builds by Mersey Care across Merseyside and what we learnt from other projects helped raise the standards even higher.
“Our team is looking forward to moving into the most modern facility of its kind in the NHS and being able to care for service users in a setting which properly reflects their professional skills.
“By involving service users, staff and local residents from the very beginning, we’ve been able to create a therapeutic environment which I believe will help people recover more quickly than usual.”
Jeanette is excited for the day the new Mossley Hill opens its doors. “I feel humble and blessed to be involved because I like to give people hope. This will be a place people can recover.”
