Mental Health

The AHSN NENC Mental Health Programme was established to address regional priorities in addition to contributing to the national agenda for mental health care reform.

The NHS Long Term Plan states:

We must keep all that’s good about our health service and its place in our national life. But we must tackle head-on the pressures our staff face, while making our extra funding go as far as possible. And as we do so, we must accelerate the redesign of patient care to future-proof the NHS for the decade ahead.

It will do this by focusing on digital innovation, tackling workforce pressures, paying attention to clinical outcomes, move to a new service delivery model and focus more on prevention and health inequalities.

The aim of the Programme is to identify and enable transformational change that can add value for service users, carers, families and local communities. The Programme achieves this by working in partnership to enable the system wide adoption of innovation at scale and pace.

Mental Health projects supported by AHSN NENC include:

Trauma Informed Care

Healthy Happy Places

FREED

First Episode Rapid Early Intervention for Eating Disorders (FREED) is a service model and care pathway which aims to provide timely, well-coordinated, developmentally informed and evidence-based care for young people with eating disorders (EDs). The AHSN NENC has supported work in this area since 2020, find out more about FREED.

View a paper on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on referral numbers, diagnostic mix, and symptom severity in Eating Disorder Early Intervention Services in England.

For more information about the AHSN NENC Mental Health Programme contact Divya Dinraj.