Mental Health

Our main interest and area of work in the mental health field is around peoples’ place as citizens and the extent to which services can and do support people to live full lives in their communities. The NDTi has played an important role over the last ten years in policy and practice development around this issue – particularly in Scotland and England.

This has led to a range of work programmes described in other parts of this website. The mental health dimension of these has particularly included:

• Social inclusion training – delivered to many provider organisations in the public and voluntary sector
• A particular interest in employment and a range of approaches to promoting paid work including linked to the PSA 16 indiciator on employment and social inclusionA central interest in the personalisation agenda including working with the DH to develop good practice guidance on personalisation and mental health and an NDTi workstrand on developing person centred approaches in the mental health field
• A new initiative on how guidance and practice around staff professional boundaries might impact upon peoples social inclusion
• A new initiative on user involvement in recruitment, aiming to promote good practice to increase participation in staff selectionA growing understanding of the complex ways in which staff run groups and services can make the transition to becoming user-run
• One place that we have seen all these elements link together is the new role of day services, although we have worked in many other types of service as well

For more information or a discussion, please contact Peter Bates