• Mental Health
  • Independent mental health service

Archived: Referral, Utilisation and Intensive Case Management

Overall: Requires improvement read more about inspection ratings

1 Printing House Street, Birmingham, West Midlands, B4 6DF 0300 300 0099

Provided and run by:
Operose Health Limited

Important: The provider of this service changed. See old profile

Latest inspection summary

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Background to this inspection

Updated 26 March 2020

Referral, Utilisation and Intensive Case Management is provided by Operose Health Limited. The service is subcontracted by a local hospital trust as part of Forward-Thinking Birmingham's services for children and young people aged 0 to 25 years.

The service has been in operation since 1 April 2016. The service was known as The Access Centre, offering a single point of contact for referral to the children’s and young people’s community mental health services in Birmingham. The service operates between 09:00 and 17:00 Monday to Friday. The staff team within The Access Centre included nurses, social workers and assistant psychologists alongside administration staff. Staff reviewed the referrals made to the service and offered either a triage assessment or signpost to a more appropriate service.

We last inspected this service in June 2018 when it received an overall rating of outstanding. At that time the service was registered under another provider. At the previous inspection the service offered Utilisation and Intensive Case Management, However, they are no longer commissioned to provide this part of the service.

The service was registered to provide: transport services, triage and medical advice provided remotely, treatment of disease, disorder or injury.

The Access Centre did not currently have a registered manager but were in the process of recruitment.

Overall inspection

Requires improvement

Updated 26 March 2020

Referral, Utilisation and Intensive Case Management are known as The Access Centre and are a community-based services for people with mental health needs for single point of access activity for children and young people aged 0–25 living in the Birmingham area.

We rated Referral, Utilisation and Case Management as requires improvement:

Our rating of this service went down. We rated it as requires improvement because:

This service was previously rated outstanding overall because it offered the Utilisation and Intensive Case Management part of the service which sought innovative ways to project a continuous cycle of improvement. The Access Centre is no longer contracted to provide this part of the service. The service has dropped two ratings to requires improvement as the safe, responsive and well led domains during this inspection have been rated requires improvement.

  • The service did not always have sufficient staff to manage the number of patient referrals on the services caseload, patients referrals were clinically screened within four hours.  However, the queue to be triaged for patients screened as requiring routine care were not always triaged in a timely manner.  At the time of the last inspection 87% of non-crisis referrals were triaged within 72 hours, but the year to date figures running up to this inspection 47% of non-crisis referrals were triaged within 72 hours. However, data provided by the service for January 2020 highlighted 70% of routine referrals were triaged within 72 hours.
  • The caseload volume caused delay in routine triage and delayed referral on to further treatment. However, the service was easy to access.
  • Staff did not routinely receive mandatory training in the Mental Health Act and the Mental Health Code of Practice.
  • The provider did not have a clear strategy to ensure robust local management levels.
  • Staff we interviewed did not have a clear understanding of the providers vision and values.

However:

  • Staff assessed and managed risk well and followed good practice with respect to safeguarding.
  • Staff referred to a range of treatments suitable to the needs of the patient, Staff assessed and referred patients on who required urgent care promptly.
  • The teams included or had access to the range of specialists required to meet the needs of the patients. Managers ensured that these staff received training, supervision and appraisal. Staff worked well together as a multidisciplinary team and with relevant services outside the organisation.
  • Staff treated patients with compassion and kindness, respected their privacy and dignity, and understood the individual needs of patients.