By Suzanne Traynor @Traynors
Associate Professor Mental Health (Practice) at Middlesex University & My Care Academy.
The Care Programme Approach (CPA) is the way mental health services work with service users. Our relationship with the service user is at the centre of this process and it is based upon the principles of recovery. Enablement draws on these well-recognised principles of recovery but also includes social inclusion and community integration to maximise resilience.
All staff need the opportunity to learn about CPA and share best practice examples across the Trust. A working group made up of service users, clinical staff, My Care Academy staff and the communication team at BEH-MHT came together to start the process of thinking about CPA and share ideas of best practice. Our ambition was to create a unit of learning that would meet the learning needs of all staff and would strongly focus on best practice determined by service users and staff.
CPA includes the following:
When developing this CPA learning unit, we agreed that we wanted to highlight the following:
Following our initial meeting we then progressed working in smaller groups and developed the unit through many iterations based on feedback and comments from the larger working group. Information about CPA is available on the BEH-MHT website as well as a leaflet for service users. We have now completed this unit of learning and it is now available on your Trust ESR.