"management of psych care "

Thanks for your feedback. We welcome comments about your thoughts on the standards of care at our services at West Cumberland Hospital. We are not sure from your comments whether your stays with us have been recent but we would like to reassure you that we have undertaken a significant amount of work over the last few months to address the problems that you have raised. We are currently implementing the National programme ‘Productive Mental Health Wards’. As part of this programme to further improve the quality of services provided to service users, the ward at West Cumberland Hospital became the first ward in the trust to implement the patient’s journey in December 2009. This explicitly shows the standards of care that service users can expect whilst an in-patient, (these are based on the Care Quality Commission’s Essential Standards for Quality and Safety and also the Royal College of Psychiatrist’s Accreditation for In-patient Mental Health Services). As part of this programme, staff based at West Cumberland Hospital ensure that all service users admitted to our in-patient wards at West Cumberland are immediately allocated a named nurse and are also orientated via our staff picture board to the nurses who will be co-ordinating their care whilst they are an in-patient. The views of service users and carers are also regularly sought on their care plan and experience within the ward and there is a full programme of activities available on the ward. All of the early signs are that this has been very successful and we now plan to implement this programme in all of the inpatient wards throughout the Trust. We hope that this gives you some reassurance, if you would like to discuss this further please e-mail us with your contact details and we will arrange for someone to contact you.