Lived Experiences of Changes to Mental Health, Camden

Healthwatch Camden offered to work with the service users at the Highgate Centre to co-design a research project that would seek to capture, in real time, their lived experiences of the service changes at the Centre, this followed service changes in 2015-16 which service users reported their concerns about.

Eleven service users volunteered to record regular weekly “audio diaries” over the course of the changes at the Highgate Centre for 30 weeks. These eleven were broadly representative of the total body of service users which included men and women, older and younger people and were from a range of ethnic groups including black and minority groups.

As a result of the analysis of the data sets a series of recommendations were made and included:

• The concerns of existing service users must be respected as valuable evidence for planning service change.

• Service user engagement around changes to existing services should be rigorous in methodology and serious in intent.

• The support needs of existing service users should be a priority concern during changes to services. Support provided should begin early and remain consistent.

• Change management should ensure consistency and transparency in feedback loops for the communication of decision making to service users.

• A joint formal apology to service users at the Highgate Centre for the negative impact on their wellbeing that resulted from the changes and poor management of the change process should be provided.

The report includes a response from Camden Council and Camden and Islington Foundation Trust where it acknowledges the findings and states they were committed to working proactively with service users and an apology to service users during the process.