Devon Partnership NHS Trust is a mental health trust established in 2001. It provides mental health and learning disability services in Devon, England. During the course of a year, the trust receives 66,000 referrals. It supports around 20,000 people every month and makes contact with around 1,000 people every day.
Services
The Trust created an innovative care home training project in 2013 receiving funding from the Prime Ministers Dementia Challenge Fund. The South Devon Care HomeLearning Community has shown a significant improvement in the quality of care for people with dementia in care homes and won the British Medical Journal Dementia Team of the Year 2015. The reorganisation of the Devon Dementia Service has also received a Royal College of Psychiatrists Innovation Award and was shortlisted for a National Patient Safety Award in 2015. In December 2016, the Trust announced that it had applied for planning permission to build a brand new, £5.5m Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit in Exeter. This service is not currently available in Devon and, during 2015/16, 116 placements were made outside the county for people requiring care in a PICU. Reducing the number of people who have to travel long distances for care is one of the Trust's main objectives, and it has reduced the number by two thirds in the last two years. In 2016, NHS England announced that funding had been identified to build a specialist Mother and Baby Unit in the south-west to support new mothers with severe mental health needs. The Trust is actively making the case to have the unit located in Devon. Like the PICU, it will make a huge difference to people, and their families, who currently have to travel long distances for care outside Devon. As well as community and hospital services, the Trust has a number of other teams providing services for people with more specific needs. These include:
– an initiative that recognises and supports employers who are positive about mental health. The scheme celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2014, has received widespread praise and has been adopted by countries as far afield as Canada and Australia.
The Trust has specialist Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams that support people who require urgent care and support. Increasingly, it is working with colleagues in the county’s general hospitals to integrate physical health services with mental health and learning disability services. These include liaison psychiatry teams to support adults and older people in hospital with a wide range of needs, as well as specialist learning disability nurses, memory clinics and perinatal teams to support pregnant women and new mothers. The Trust is also working increasingly closely with the police to support people with mental health and learning disability needs and its Street Triage and Liaison and Diversion services have attracted widespread acclaim.
Performance
The trust was last inspected by the Care Quality Commission in June & July 2019, the report was published in October 2019 and its overall rating was 'Good'.
