Thursday 3 July 2025
The NHS 10 Year Health Plan’s commitment to shifting care from hospitals into the community is not just a strategic ambition – it’s essential.
As someone deeply involved in mental health services in Durham Tees Valley, I welcome this direction wholeheartedly. It aligns with what we’ve been doing locally for several months, with positive results already being seen.
The Community Mental Health Transformation was designed to change the way mental health care and support is delivered in local areas – seeing NHS, voluntary sector and wider organisations working together to ensure people get the right help closer to home.
In the Durham Tees Valley region, we’ve embraced this and we’re working to bridge the gap between GPs and specialised mental health services, or secondary care, as it’s known.
Through working in partnership with our primary care networks, local authorities, voluntary care services and alcohol and drugs services, we’ve embraced our core principles – we accept each other’s referrals, we don’t refuse a referral and there is no ‘wrong door’.
Our approach is simple but powerful: help people early, keep them well and connect them with the right support.
Our community mental health model is built around two core levels of support, ‘get help’ and ‘get more help’.
The ‘get help’ team is the first point of contact, offering accessible support through community hubs. The hubs bring together physical health services, support in GP surgeries, peer support and care navigators. The team focuses on triage and assessment, early support, wellbeing advice and signposting to local voluntary and community services.
For those who need more intensive or specialist support, the ‘get more help’ team steps in, providing treatment and interventions.
This two-tiered approach ensures that people receive the right care at the right time. This means that less people need to be referred to other healthcare providers, and it supports a more preventative, person-centred way of working.
We’ve already seen positive impact that is having on patients, with a 15-20%reduction in the number of people who need secondary care referrals. This, coming at a time when we expected them to rise due to the pandemic and increasing neurodevelopmental needs, is remarkable.
New roles are a big part of this movement, including mental health practitioners based in GP surgeries. In 2024 alone, over 40,000 appointments were delivered in primary care in Durham Tees Valley – with only 2.5% needing to be referred to secondary care services.
We’ve introduced care navigators, who guide people through their journey in the mental health system. They help patients and carers access services within their local community – this may be foodbanks, financial, employment, housing or bereavement support.
We’re also working with Teesside Mind to introduce peer support roles into the community. Peers use their own experience of mental illness to help others – another hugely important role that is key to providing personalised care to the people in our communities.
Although we’re receiving local and national recognition for our new way of working within the community mental health transformation, we know there is still more to do.
We will continue to build strong partnerships and focus on prevention to support healthier, more resilient communities.
These aren’t just numbers – they represent people getting the right help, closer to home, faster and more effectively.
