Mental Health

Starting well

• Transformation of children and young people’s mental health services to improve mental health and physical wellbeing of children and families, working with people and local communities to develop local plans developed in 2020/21. These plans are part of the County Durham Children and Young Peoples Mental Health Partnership.
• A key focus on supporting population health management work across the County to understand the wider causes of mental ill health and help improve the availability of services.

Live well

• Reducing health inequalities by supporting mental health and emotional wellbeing is a key goal in order to reduce early deaths of people living with severe mental illness and autism in County Durham. We will do this using a combination of approaches, including empowering staff to feel confident in accessing mental health and wellbeing through 'Make Every Contact Count' training, mental health first aid and suicide prevention training, and ensuring those supporting people with the most complex needs are appropriately trained.
• Another key area is to ensure that people can access urgent and crisis mental health care at the right time.

Ageing well

• We will be supporting a new mental health workforce in Primary Care to address mental and physical health in older people ensuring the approach of 'what matters to you' is applied in all settings.

• Patient feedback and data including 'wait to access' 'population health data' and 'workforce data' will inform us of the differences we have made for people and the impact felt within communities.