New project to support mental illness across Black Country and West Birmingham

March 22, 2022

A project is now underway to support identified patients with serious mental illness (SMI). These patients in the Black Country and West Birmingham have 15-18 years shorter life expectancy due to premature deaths from preventable physical illnesses. They also tend to not engage with routine care services and utilise emergency care when their needs become urgent.

The personalised care project is being clinically led by James Gwilt, Lead GP from Your Health Partnership and has involved setting up a small team of colleagues to deliver personalised care. This team is known as the Living Well Team and includes Social Prescribing Link Workers, a Care Coordinator, a Health and Wellbeing Coach and a Mental Health Practitioner. These roles are new and probably not readily recognised or understood by many clinicians. If you would like to understand more about this model of care please click here or see Personalised Care Additional Roles slides

The model is based on the design principles that patient preferences matter and that healthcare professionals do not always understand the healthcare decisions patients would make. The team will initially work with SMI patients, identified from the SMI register using techniques such as shared decision making, motivational interviewing and care coordination. This project will be evaluated as it develops, with a view to rolling the model out to other identified local population groups with poor health outcomes.