Enter and view: Living Well Network Hub, Lambeth

Healthwatch Lambeth conducted an announced enter and view visit on 2nd & 11th August, 2016, to Living Well Network Hub, a program for comprehensive community mental health and wellbeing support, with a multidisciplinary team of professionals across the borough who work collaboratively to meet service- user needs. Residents can refer themselves or be referred for the 12 week program, working towards achieving three big outcomes: To recover and stay well, to make their own choices and to participate on an equal footing in daily life.

The access to the Hub, 4th floor, is through the very busy Job Centre on the ground floor. The ambiance inside is nice and calm, and it was clean, bright and well maintained. sessions at community locations. Feedback from two service users was gathered at the North locality outreach on the planned visit day; this was supplemented the following week with information collection from three service users at the SouthEast locality outreach session in Clapham.

Service users described their limited interaction with LWN Hub staff as “really nice”, “pretty good” and “A1 – they are the best”. Clients were most commonly referred to the service by their GP.

The report summarises that given the limited nature of interaction service users had had with the LWN Hub, the HW team were unable to gain a substantial impression of the quality of the service. That said, the initial feedback provided suggested that service users are being listened to, and that support will be offered to deal with their immediate needs. While it is not solely in the control of the LWN Hub, HW believes that continued work needs to be carried out with GP services to ensure that they understand what the Hub can do so as to manage their own and their patients’ expectations. The HW team found the LWN Hub to be an innovative model and a new way of working, so it should continue to monitor its development and find ways to involve service users fully in this process.

Recommendations made by HW included clearer signage at the front, review the material available to local stakeholder, find ways for the staff to foster a sense of ownerships over space and time with clients, monitor the feedback coming in from the clients, and work on integration of local services.

The provider responded “I think this is a fair and honest report and I welcome the feedback for the Hub. I have no comments to add other than to thank you and the team for your efforts.”