"Unhappy with Crisis Resolution Home Treatment Team"

Dear Survivor 12345

I am genuinely sorry to hear that your experience of contacting the Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Team on this occasion was unhelpful but thank you for bringing it to our attention. Such personal feedback is invaluable to us in our attempts to continually improve the service we provide.

I am Guy Brookes, Associate Medical Director for Adult Mental Health Services in Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

It sounds as though you were going through a very distressing time last year and the uncertainty and long wait must have been very frustrating and difficult for you.

When people are referred to us in crisis we do aim to see them as quickly as possible. I’m not sure why it took so long for someone to contact you last year but with a few more details we would be able to look into this.

I am also sorry that you were upset by the enquiry as to whether you had used alcohol or drugs, and I'd like to explain a bit more about this if I may. Firstly, I am completely aware that if not done sensitively this could appear judgmental, but it's quite usual for our practitioners to ask people this when they contact the service.

The reason for doing so is to give our practitioners a better understanding of the factors contributing to someone’s distress so that they can better help people and ensure that they are safe – we all behave differently when intoxicated than when not.

From your posting I am unable to ascertain whether you had previously been in contact with our services. The need to help people in crisis is important to us and an area to which we pay particular attention. Therefore, for reasons that I’m sure you will appreciate, when people receive care from us one of the priorities is to develop a “Crisis Plan”.

This is simply a description of the difficulties people have at times of particular need and what is helpful to them at these times. When someone then phones our Crisis Assessment Service our practitioners are able to see a copy of the crisis plan and help someone through it using their own preferred strategies.

Partly as a result of feedback from service users such as yourself, since your experience last year the Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Team has changed to focus more on undertaking assessments of people in crisis and providing out-of-hours support for people who, as described above, are already receiving care from us but are feeling unable to cope at that time.

I would hope that in the unfortunate event such a situation arises again, you would now receive a response more suited to your personal requirements. However I completely appreciate that the occasion you refer to above was clearly a very significant one for you, and I'd like to again apologise for your experience of our crisis care.

It is difficult to provide more specific advice to you without further details, but should you wish to find out how to develop a Crisis Plan that suits your needs, or wish us to further look into your experience to see what we can learn, it would be helpful if you could contact our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS). They will be keen to help facilitate this for you.

PALS can be contacted on 0800 0525 790 or at pals.lypft@nhs.net.

We look forward to hearing from you, and I of course sincerely hope that you have moved forward to a more comfortable position than the one you describe last year.

Yours sincerely,

Guy Brookes

Associate Medical Director for Adult Services

Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust