Welcome to the May’s update of the Lambeth Mental Health Carer forum. It has been a while since I did an update for the forum, since I could not attend the previous Lambeth MH carer forum and forgot to blog about the other previous forums.

This forum caters for unpaid carers who are caring for someone with a mental health need, e.g. someone suffering from psychosis, eating disorder, depression, bipolar and other MH illnesses.

The forum is strategic and gives carers the involvement and empowerment to query, question and even compliment the mental health services in Lambeth and sometimes beyond e.g. we are hoping to have a representative from NHS england attend in future.

This Lambeth MH forum was on the 31st of May and was well attended with some very good questions and statements from the forum members. The Lambeth MH Carers forum is run from the 336 building off Brixton road.

Guest speakers at the forum was Stacey Hemphill from the ‘Living Well Network Hub’ and also Lambeth Police Mental Health lead inspector Mark McLeavery.

Updates from Stacey was on how and why the Lambeth Living Well Network was started up and provides support people’s Mental Health and wellbeing. They liason with Lambeth GPs and those using the services.

Stacey talked about how the network engages with carers and what support they can provide service users. The Living Well network runs at the following places being the Mosaic Clubhouse on Effra Road, Clapham Methodist Church and also at 336 Brixton Road, you can call them on 0203-691-5080 or email them on slm-tr.lwnhub@nhs.net

Next up was Inspector Mark McLeavery from the Lambeth Met Police. He spoke about how the Lambeth police engages with someone who is in a crisis out in public. The forum were very interested to hear how someone in crisis ends up at the Maudsley’ hospital ‘Central Place of Safety’.

Mark mentioned Lambeth has a challenging and high rate of mental health needs, plus the stigma of mental health can make things even more challenging.

Mark Spoke about the Crisis Assessment Team ‘CAT’ and the use of ‘street triage’ Mark stressed that there are no use for police custody cells for those in mental distress, although I did mention the problem with beds and he mentioned at worse A&E might be the last option for someone in serve distress.

The forum moved on to discuss GDPR and updates from Carers Hub Lambeth, it now seems that the charity ‘Help for Carers’ is being disbanded and Carers Hub Lambeth has split from it.

Going on to the minutes of the last forum that took place in April, the updates were from how Lambeth Healthwatch are engaging with its support networks. Updates on the King’s Health Partners ‘Mind & Body’ programme. Updates on C4C visits, plus the good news on the Money and MH Link update with government passing a law that supports those suffering debt from MH illness, which involved one of our very own carer member of the forum helping to lead on the project.

Other updates have been no news on the rota from SLaM regarding guest speakers, but I mentioned the trust were under reorganisation, so we will see what happens after that. There is also a push to have a Lambeth MP engage with the forum to see the wonderful work unpaid carers are trying to do to help their community.

This concludes the update from the Lambeth MH carers forum.