Hi Euan - trust you’re well! Since meeting, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the piece of advice you gave:
“Don’t make a complicated system any more complicated!” - I can see how this links to the idea of inclusion health teams. Having people who have been there before makes all the difference. At the moment, it seems the hurdles are very high to access anything like that sort of support.
It has been amazing and alarming to learn how fragmented and complicated services are! Given that the people who (a) pay for them, (b) work in them cannot describe simply how it fits together, it is no wonder that (c) people who need to access them find it demoralising and stigmatising!
It’s an omnishambles. And vulnerable people struggling with MH, drug and alcohol issues suffer the most. We had 30 patients in the community waiting for acute MH beds earlier in the year, many of them self medicating. And today the crisis team refused to take a patient because they were homeless. My patients get substandard care because of prejudice against them. It’s a case by case fight for each individual. There is no inclusion or integration. Just a mess.
I often feel just the same - it feels like there is no bit of the system that is anything other than broken/at breaking point. It's tiring and frustrating and, too often, heartbreaking. More than anything I hope people like you, appalled at the current state of it all, can keep going - it's got to be the best chance we have to see improvement in the longer term.
Otherwise I think we fall into a 'shifting baseline' problem, which is already happening to some extent. People leave, new people come in, and they just accept the situation they find as normal. And, to me, it's not normal - it's abnormal in very many ways and we've got to keep pointing it out.
Hi Euan - trust you’re well! Since meeting, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the piece of advice you gave:
“Don’t make a complicated system any more complicated!” - I can see how this links to the idea of inclusion health teams. Having people who have been there before makes all the difference. At the moment, it seems the hurdles are very high to access anything like that sort of support.
It has been amazing and alarming to learn how fragmented and complicated services are! Given that the people who (a) pay for them, (b) work in them cannot describe simply how it fits together, it is no wonder that (c) people who need to access them find it demoralising and stigmatising!
It would be good to meet again soon.
It’s an omnishambles. And vulnerable people struggling with MH, drug and alcohol issues suffer the most. We had 30 patients in the community waiting for acute MH beds earlier in the year, many of them self medicating. And today the crisis team refused to take a patient because they were homeless. My patients get substandard care because of prejudice against them. It’s a case by case fight for each individual. There is no inclusion or integration. Just a mess.
I often feel just the same - it feels like there is no bit of the system that is anything other than broken/at breaking point. It's tiring and frustrating and, too often, heartbreaking. More than anything I hope people like you, appalled at the current state of it all, can keep going - it's got to be the best chance we have to see improvement in the longer term.
Otherwise I think we fall into a 'shifting baseline' problem, which is already happening to some extent. People leave, new people come in, and they just accept the situation they find as normal. And, to me, it's not normal - it's abnormal in very many ways and we've got to keep pointing it out.