Accessing Mental Health Services in Leeds Review

Date: November 2020

Lead: Adam Stewart, Senior Engagement Officer

Brief description of the project

This insight review seeks to pull together what people living in Leeds have already told us about their needs and preferences in relation to accessing mental health services, including access to crisis and early intervention services. It aims to highlight common themes and any gaps, in order to support future improvements to people’s experiences of receiving health and care services.

Where did we get the insight from?

We gathered insight from a variety of local and national sources including:

• Care Opinion
• Engagement work carried out by NHS Leeds CCG
• Feedback from service users, collected by service providers
• Healthwatch Leeds
• CQC

What did we find out?

The insight told us that people who have had experiences of accessing mental health services need:

• Staff to not be dismissive, to be caring and empathic towards service users, showing a good attitude and a kind tone.
• Staff to know what services people can access and how people can access them.
• Communication to be clear, efficient and include the right information and not assume that a service user knows how services work.
• Crisis services to have meaningful interventions that can help the service user, not rely on the service user to come up with.
• Crisis to not leave someone in a crisis situation without support or intervention.
• Mental health care needs to be person-centred, tailored to someone’s needs.
• Shorter waiting times.
• Better integration between all service providers (statutory and third sector).

We also found that service providers need to routinely collect patient experience from services users and use this to shape their services

You can read the full insight report here:

What did we do?

We have shared this insight report with the ‘Priority 6: Crisis Working Group’ who will use this insight to develop the strategy for crisis and early intervention services.