Welcome to the first January Lewisham BAME carer forum for 2021. The BAME carer forum is one of the 6 carer forums I run once a month. The carer forum runs online to adhere to covid-19 restrictions and allows members to attend a lot more easily.

The BAME Mental Health carer forum is aimed at BAME carers who are caring for someone with a mental illness, especially for someone using the services of South London & Maudsley, although I am not super strict who attends the forum since carers from other forums and boroughs often attend.

On the January agenda were the following.

• NHS England presenting on their National Patient Carer Race Equality Framework (PCREF)
• SLaM presenting on their Local drives for PCREF
• SLaM older adults diversity drive

We were joined by Staff from Oxleas as well as Manchester NHS Trust who are also seeking to engage and improve services for the BAME community.

A representative from Public Health Lewisham also attended as well as carers, black mental health activists and researchers.

NHS England & Improvement presents PCREF

Husnara Malik the Programme Manager for National Mental Health Team presented on “Improving Black, Asian and minority ethnic community experiences of mental health services”.

She spoke about the Advancing Mental Health Equalities Strategy which outlines the short and longer-term actions NHS England and NHS Improvement, which will advance equalities in access, experience and outcomes in mental health services. The Strategy builds on the 8 urgent actions health systems must take to advance equalities in the round, referenced in the Phase 3 COVID-19 response letter.

The Key objectives of the Advancing Mental Health Equality Strategy are

• Developing the Patient and Carers Race Equality Framework (PCREF).
• Investing in advancing mental health equalities via transformation/pilot sites.
• Sharing evidence where it emerges.
• Developing a Provider Collaboratives impact framework.
• Improving the quality and flow of data to national NHS datasets.
• Using headline measures of mental health equality to monitor change over time, at both national and local level.
• Supporting the development of a representative workforce at all levels, equipped with the skills and knowledge to advance mental health equalities.

The aim of the PCREF is to improve the way organisations deliver mental health services so the experience of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic patients and carers improves; to the end of making services more accessible, and to improve the health outcomes for Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic patient and carers.

But What is it?

The PCREF is an organisational competency framework that values the voices of racialised communities’ lived experience to help service improvement by providing more culturally appropriate care. It is a practical tool which helps organisations to understand what steps it can take to achieve practical improvements.

Components of the PCREF

• Part 1: Statutory and Regulatory Obligations

An outline of the core statutory and regulatory obligations the PCREF will support Trusts to fulfil, including (but not limited to):
Human Rights Act 1998
Equality Act 2010
Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES)
Use of Force Act 2018 (The Mental Health Units)
CQC Inspection Criteria well led

• Part 2: Organisational Competencies

Core ‘competencies’ culturally-responsive services should demonstrate (see next slide)
Guidance on how to identify and additional, local competencies
Advice and support on how to build these competencies

• Part 3: Assessment and Feedback Tool

A Patient and Carer Feedback Mechanism, to be supported by a benchmarking tool, which tracks progress over time

So far the Steering group formed, consisting of experts by experience and 4 PCREF Pilot Trust partners – Birmingham and Solihull, Greater Manchester, East London and South London and Maudsley Trust.

They Held deep-dives into differential BAME experiences within mental health service pathways

Building on the above, and the Mental Health Act review, identified 10 potential organisational competencies

Started engaging with patients and carers on these potential competencies, with further engagement in the pipeline

How can people with lived experiences including volunteers get more involved with mental health services to help improve the outcomes and experiences for BAME communities?

NHSE&I currently have a number of people with lived experience as patients/carers co-developing the PCREF. NHSE&I also believe it will be critical for the PCREF to be developed in partnership with local communities, with lived experience informing its development and ongoing evaluation. They expect ‘co-production’ will be one of the core competencies of the PCREF itself. This means we would expect Trusts to have clear and transparent ways of working with diverse communities to inform service improvements, and how they are evaluated

NHSE&I aim to achieve this by holding more engagement with specific groups i.e. older people, people with a disability and other groups in the development process (accounting for intersectionality). In addition, they will be rolling out a more targeted questionnaire on the competencies in the PCREF Pilot sites early in 2021. Our Pilot sites will be focusing on more ‘in-reach’ models of engagement like targeted workshops and focus-groups as part of this

Zoe Reed SLaM Non-Executive from the board presents

Zoe explained the key principles for developing reponse to the fact that we know that many black service users and carers don’t get equal access to mental health services. So the principles SLaM are using are the joint leadership SLaM and the BAME community between each program on PCREF that they were building towards their database

Zoe mentioned their will be joint chairs at every level between the community and SLaM on the new PCREF initative. So this is the program that SLaM are working towards at the beginning of phase one for this year. SLaM are now is really looking at the data and trying to get an understanding about what the data is, and how that might lead them to think where are the gaps for black people using their mental health services?

Carer questions

Some members were interested in attending the community PCREF events hosted by SLaM and the BAME community, so there were a few questions regarding this. Other question on if SLaM were going to involve the carer centres where BAME carers also use their services.

SLaM Older Adult services Presents

This was a shorter presentation on how Older Adult services were also looking to engage with the BAME community on memory services. There has been a lot of engagement with the organisation Black Thrive in Lambeth and Southwark, but there needs to be a way to engage in Lewisham.

This concludes the January BAME carer forum for 2021