World Mental Health Day

Sarah writes about her experience as carer for World Mental Health Day.

As the Programme Manager the Health and Social Care Academy, I see inspirational examples of health and social care services everyday and feel positive and heartened at the high quality support and services available across Scotland. Many people are working hard and displaying courageous leadership to improve the outcomes and lives of others.

However, in my role as a carer over the past four years my experience is very different. Primarily my interaction has been with NHS mental health services and on a personal level, after every conversation I am left feeling angry, disappointed and frustrated as I often feel the staff lack kindness and compassion and don’t display a willingness to help you.

At a service level I constantly feel dismayed by the system, which is disjointed and services even within one area, such as mental health, (in my experience) regularly fail to communicate with each other and see the person as a whole. Instead, the person is viewed as a number and each individual service only focuses on their small part.

Services and staff are clearly under huge amounts of pressure and this results in staff sometimes being short tempered and mistakes being made, such as referrals being lost, appointments not made and followed up, and no compassion shown.

The person I care for spent nine months accessing mental health services in Dumfries and Galloway and still had no care plan in place. When I challenged this, I was simply told that she had “slipped through the net”. After being on the waiting list for psychological services for nine months and receiving no referral for treatment she moved to another Health Board and has once again had to join a very long waiting list for a talking therapy, with no acknowledgement that she has already waited for a long time in another Health Board.

Not only do services not communicate each other but each Health Board seems to operate in a silo.

I feel that a whole systems approach is needed and for someone to recognise that a 21 year old has already spent three years in her bed with depression and urgently needs some practical support, rather than each individual service, in each individual Health Board solely focusing on their own small piece of the puzzle.

However, within the current system this sadly does not seem to be possible and despite spending many hours every week, following up referrals with services we are still patiently waiting for some support.  I fear it will be many more months before any support is in place.The person I care for is lucky she has me to advocate on her behalf. I dread to think what happens for people who do not have anyone to care for them and liaise with support services.

I would like to see services view people as individuals rather then a number on a waiting list. A culture change is needed across the health service to take a different approach to delivering care and support, both in how services are delivered and how staff interact with people.

In my professional life I truly believe that this is possible and that many steps towards this are already being taken, however, as a carer dealing with individual services I constantly feel disheartened and overwhelmed by the scale of the change that is needed.

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