Mental health

Mental Health is intrinsically linked to the health and wellbeing of local people. By ensuring that people’s experiences of mental health services, as well as the impact that wider determinants of health and health inequalities can have on mental health is shared, understood, and acted upon will help to improve services and understanding of the significance of local people’s mental health.

One of the key themes within mental health experiences across the past 12 months has been that people haven’t felt listened to by services that support them. We have been working closely with Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to improve this. The trust introduced a new ‘learning from experience’ forum to bring together service leads from across the organisation to discuss what they’re hearing through feedback and complaints and how services are responding to this. We met with them in October 2023 to discuss how we could help better shape this forum.

Our current work under this priority:

• We have agreed a project about improving feedback within mental health services for people with learning disabilities​
• We have shared concerns about communication to families about the review of the ASD (autism spectrum disorder) diagnosis pathway. We are currently awaiting a response to this.

Other reports and bulletins relating to this priority can be found under the mental health category of our reports section on our website.