Tuesday: I had an entirely
positive experience as I was privileged to open the
new Medical Education Centre at North Manchester General
Hospital, part of the activities of North Western psychiatry
and postgraduate medical education. It is a real commitment
by the Trust in recognising the importance of medical education. It
was great to meet with their Chair, their Chief Executive,
consultants from across the Trust and key members of the Deanery,
including Jackie Hayden who as you know is the Dean with
postgraduate medical lead for psychiatry.
We were able to have very a frank
discussion following my presentation on the NHS reform and its
impact on mental health services. The consultants were able to give
me very clear messages about what they wanted the College to be
doing, and how the College could improve in what it was
doing.
I would like to applaud this Trust
in that they have taken a particular open and transparent approach
to serious incidents. It made me think about our own approach, as a
College, in supporting members where we are involved in
adverse incidents, but also the approach that the College should
take to the whole area of risk.
We are going to set up a new group looking at
risk, chaired by Dr John Morgan, and I want to push the concept of
positive risk-taking. I know this goes against the tide in a
risk averse society. If we’re really going to deliver and help
our users of services to truly go on the road to recovery, we have
to be able to live with risk in enabling and empowering them to
move forward in their own lives.
The rest of this week has been very busy, but
positive. Yesterday in the morning, I went to a meeting about
the NHS Mandate. The positive thing here was that there was lots of
conversation on emerging themes about the importance of parity of
esteem between physical and mental health, and a recognition that
there needed to be more attention paid within the NHS Mandate
to mental health and learning disability. It was good that it
was not just me, but the NGOs for mental health were also
making this point. We had great support from the rest of the
voluntary sector working in social care, and also from the
Presidents from other Colleges - so we really are getting the
message out there.
In the afternoon I was able to meet with Steve
Field who has been charged with looking at the regular three year
review of the NHS constitution. Again, working with Policy, we
had gone very carefully through the NHS constitution and saw many
opportunities to put more in about mental health and parity of
esteem. We've had a very positive reception, and in
particular, we will be taking forward some work and supporting
Steve Field as he takes up his role leading on inequalities. It is
clear he is going to take a particular interest in learning
disabilities, so we are arranging for him to meet with the Chair of
the Intellectual Disability Faculty and other key people working in
this area. Steve Field clearly has a passion for
those who are in vulnerable groups, and thinks as a
GP about the background of the whole person and not
just the medical condition.
So I do hope that the work I have led
on, and that so many of you have contributed to, will
raise the profile of psychiatry and mental health, and how the
whole needs of our patients can be met. This is now having
some positive results across all the various government
activities.
I had an interesting meeting with
GMC on Fairness.
It was good to see a whole section on working with people with
learning disability. As expected, the audience had a range of
concerns around education and training and fitness to practice, as
well as about doctors who commit suicide whilst going through
a GMC process. My challenge is what will the GMC do about ensuring
medical schools deliver appropriate and proportionate training in
mental health.
Subscribe to this post's comments using
RSS