Tuesday 22 April 2008

BLPT

The minutes of the last Bedfordshire and Luton Partnership Trust Board meeting were published online today.
At the last Board meeting a suggestion was proposed to enable more people to have access to "talking therapies" by ensuring that those staff who have been trained in the delivery of such therapies allocate time, at a central point, to deliver such therapies to service users.
The document was described as "praiseworthy, well written, creative and it demonstrated initiative". Nonetheless, the decision at the meeting was to talk about the idea some more, to set up a committee to look at it and talk about it and then to talk about it some more.
Argh!

They also discussed sending more service users "back to primary care". The decision has been taken that as many people as possible who are currently being seen by specialist services will be referred back to GP services. That probably includes people like me. People who GPs have decided need more than they can provide.

Oh, and there is no mention of the survey of those who have used the complaints service. Perhaps because that survey is still not being carried out.

As ever, there is no evidence that issues from previous meetings are followed up and that promised actions take place. "Matters arising" do not include statements that actions promised in previous meetings have (or have not) taken place. No wonder that promised actions can fail to materialise, really.

4 comments:

Fiona Marcella said...

I can hear the GPs screaming now - but no one will listen to them.

Disillusioned said...

Sadly I fear you are too too right.
I can hear service users screaming too - but everyone is used to not listening to them already; they don't count.

Made by Mandy said...

Hi both,

If you can hear the GPs screaming you gotta think on what service users will be doing too.

Not nice thoughts eh?

Reading between the lines of what the Trust is saying it could be that they are in financial crisis and offloading wherever they can. Not that financial difficulties stops them setting up more committees (usually consisting of higher/middle management and the payment of the hourly rates they get paid to attend). As in how much does it cost to keep these committees going? Would be interesting to see the finances involved.

Or that they don't want the responsiblity of having a duty of care for people they are not delivering that to (or on a much lesser scale than is necessary).

Personally, if my GP practise was financed and properly resourced to support my care needs, I would prefer to have my care met that way but I know that by offloading the mentally ill on GPs that won't be the case. There will be no additional funding for them to do so.

Disillusioned said...

I think part of it is also about reducing the numbers of people who have contact with services in order to try to improve their service user ratings. They aren't willing / able to provide the full support, so the ratings suffer. Their solution is to reduce the number of people. It scares me that I might be one of the people cast off in this way. I'm starting to move towards needing less support - the worst think would b eif that support was to precipitously disappear again, before I felt ready for that to happen.