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Community mental health survey 2012

Read the results of our latest survey which looked at the experiences of people receiving community mental health services.

Eligibility and participation

Key findings for England

The majority of participants said that they were treated with respect and dignity and were listened to carefully.

Participants: over 15,000
Response rate: 32 per cent
Age range: 18 years and older
Time period: July to September 2011
Eligibility: people who received care or treatment for a mental health condition, including services provided under the Care Programme Approach (CPA).
Exclusions: Anyone seen only once for an assessment, current inpatients, and anyone primarily receiving treatment in specific areas such as drug and alcohol abuse, learning disability services and specialist forensic services.

Key findings for England

The majority of participants said that they:

were treated with respect and dignity and were listened to carefully.
had their views taken into account and had enough time to discuss their condition and treatment.
had trust and confidence in the health or social care worker they had seen most recently.
had the out-of-hours contact number of someone from their local NHS mental health service.
could ‘always’ contact their care co-ordinator/lead professional if they had a problem and that their care co-ordinator/lead professional organised their care ‘very well’.

However, the results also showed that people needed to be more involved in some aspects of their care.

Key findings for England

A considerable proportion of respondents also would have liked more support from a member of staff with some aspects of day-to-day living.

Over a quarter of those prescribed new medication in the last 12 months said that they were not told about possible side-effects, and over a tenth said that they were not given information about it in a way that was easy to understand.
Around a third of those not on CPA said they did not know who their care co-ordinator/lead professional was.
Some respondents said that they had not had a care review in the last 12 months.

A considerable proportion of respondents also would have liked more support from a member of staff with some aspects of day-to-day living including:

physical health needs.
caring responsibilities.
finding or keeping work.
finding or keeping their accommodation.
financial advice or benefits.

Results for England

The briefing note describes all findings for England as a whole.

Community mental health survey 2012: Briefing note

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The results tables include a comparison with findings from the 2011 survey and identifies significant changes.

Community mental health survey 2012: National tables

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Results for NHS Trusts

These results show how trusts performed on questions that could be scored in each area covered by the questionnaire.

The technique used to analyse these results allows us to identify which trusts we can confidently say performed 'Better', 'Worse' or 'About the same'.

View the A-Z list of community mental health services survey results by NHS trust.

More about these results

Benchmark reports

Each trust was provided with a benchmark report on its scores in the survey. This enables them to benchmark their performance against all other trusts and identifies areas for improvement.

The information in the benchmark reports provide more detail about the data contained on our NHS trust pages.

Download the individual benchmark reports for each trust from the NHS Surveys website.