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Submission – Liberate Jersey - Follow-up Review of Mental Health Services – 28th February 2022
- We started our counselling service at the start of the pandemic when we opened it to anyone wanting mental health support. Our heaviest usage was in June 2020, September 2020, April-July 2021. In March 2021 our grant from the Emergency Fund ceased so we reverted the service to its original demographic of supporting anyone from a minority group in Jersey. We are therefore unable to give as much detail as other service providers as to the impact of COVID-19. Our anecdotal experience is that people are no longer wanting to discuss the effects of the pandemic, but this could be because our service specification has changed.
- No comment to offer.
- We were involved in a piece of work with Government in August 2020 to bring down the waiting times for accessing JTT. This realigned JTT's offering so it was seeing the higher level cases, in recognition of the fact that other service providers were able to see lower level cases. It also formed the Mental Health Network that enabled all service providers in the network to cross-refer and clients to self-refer. This work brought the waiting times down significantly at that time. We don't have information as to whether waiting times now are still as good. It is difficult to know how effective the cross-referral of clients within the network is, we have never had an official referral from any other service provider, although we suspect we have been referred by word of mouth'.
- Our experience has been positive in working with Government and other service providers. It is probably fair to say it is a picture of gradually improving provision. We have heard that some areas of provision for the higher level mental health/illness conditions are not improving at the same rate as the lower level talking therapy provision, so this might be where more focus is needed now.
- We receive a lot of positive praise for the fact that our counselling service is open- ended. We offer 6 free sessions and then, if a client wishes to continue counselling, we undertake a means-test to see whether they are able to afford to contribute towards the costs of their extra sessions; nobody is refused extra sessions. It therefore seems that clients would like other services to offer the option of open-ended sessions.
- Key Finding 24 and Recommendation 21: The Government has met with Liberate and other relevant organisations. Reform of the pathway to care for transgender and gender non-conforming Islanders is in progress, and involves a service user group in shaping the new pathway. As of this month, a pilot gender clinic that will run as a partnership between Liberate, Jersey Youth Service and Jersey Health Service has been launched and the transgender community informed of the pilot. The business case for the pilot is still sitting with Jersey Health Service for sign off. Once sign off has happened the pilot will be shared with the wider community of health professionals, such as GPs. Training for key Government practitioners and Third Sector partners has been organised by Liberate and is happening in April.