Unite the union – adaywithdave

Mental Health Nursing journal April/May 2020 – Lead professional officer update

This update featured in the April/May 2020 Mental Health Nursing journal (Vol 40 #2). For those who aren’t Unite/MHNA members, you can buy your copy online via PocketMags or join and get 6 copies per year posted to your home and access to our back-issues online.

As I write this from my kitchen table on bank holiday Monday, now a scene of many a Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype and WhatsApp Video over the last few weeks, it feels amazing that it’s only 25 days since my email to MHNA members to thank you for your efforts so far, in the battles against COVID-19.

So much has happened to our nation and our health service in such a short period of time.

In my responses to various people and organisations in recent weeks as your lead professional officer, I have repeatedly highlighted how we have entered a global pandemic with a much-weakened NHS and society.

It has struck after 10 years of austerity, where the poorest have suffered the most, and a mental health service that has faced cuts, including the 8.2% (between May 2010 and December 2019) drop in the number of mental health nurses working in England’s NHS.

While the government has taken dramatic action in some areas as a result of the pandemic, only time will tell whether this will be a continued change of heart after the initial impact of coronavirus is known.

Key areas of concern

There have been three key areas of concern that members have raised
the most frequently: the number of people working in the health service; the availability and supply of personal protective equipment to health service staff and other key workers; and the availability of COVID-19 testing for members of staff.

These are obviously all singularly important issues, but they also have a co-dependence on each other.

Alongside my role in supporting mental health nurses in Unite, I also have a role supporting our ambulance staff members.

Their concerns also highlight this co-dependency well. For example, one of our representatives has reported that her service, on that particular day, faced a 30% vacancy rate.

The rep providing the report was at home self-isolating as she had a new cough, and was feeling unsure whether she was infected, after having crewed her ambulance without the required range of PPE available.

PPE guidance

As you’ll see elsewhere in this edition, Unite has welcomed the updated PPE guidance issued by the UK public health organisations and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, although we remain acutely concerned about the levels of supply and distribution.

Unite has done a number of things including joining with the Trades Union Congress, alongside sister trade unions, to demand government action on this ‘crisis within a crisis’ – and has worked to repurpose members in manufacturing to use their skills, engineering and manufacturing expertise to ramp up production.

Collaborative working

Following requests from mental health professionals, we have been working with the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Psychiatrists

and colleagues from NHS England to produce a poster resource specifically for mental health professionals.

Work on this is well under way, and it will hopefully be published well before this journal hits your doormat.

This has not been the only resources that we have joined together to work on. For the last few weeks we have been working on guidance across

a range of topic areas and services. These, and more, are all available from the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website.

On this, I would like to offer my thanks to our lead reps from both MHNA and the Applied Psychology Organising Professional Committee, who have suffered the daily requests for feedback that I have made of them, alongside the jobs that they are doing in the NHS, the university sector and elsewhere.

Student views

This edition of the journal also picks out two other areas that have consumed time and effort.

It is great that we have been able to feature the reflections of three student nurses on how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted on them and their studies, so I send my thanks to the authors Charlotte, Ashleigh and Sandra for their insightful and thoughtful contributions.

Alongside my fellow lead professional officer and lead for regulation Jane Beach, I have been involved in regular discussions with the Nursing and Midwifery Council and others about the progress of changing students’ progress to registration.

Any questions should hopefully now be answered by the relevant guides in each of the four UK countries.

However, if any of our student nurse members have any questions, comments or concerns, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Also, if you are a student then please consider sharing your experience and reflections on the coronavirus situation, and our regular Student Focus feature is the perfect publication opportunity for this. Email the editor via mhneditor@gmail.com if you would like to contribute.

If you want to hear more about our work for students, have a listen to episode one of our new series of The Mental Health Podcast.

The importance of mental health nurses

This issue of Mental Health Nursing also includes a welcome piece by Simon Hall from the University of the West of England, on the importance of mental health nurses, especially during the pandemic.

This has also been an area that has required much thought and consideration.

As in ‘normal’ times, people with mental ill health often get put to the back of the healthcare queue.

It would be a further travesty if this situation is furthered during COVID-19, with various attempts to divert mental health professionals to the ‘physical health fight’.

We have already opposed some plans that have been proposed nationally, which would have had exactly this impact.

Support is vital

It is clear that it will take a long time for the true impact of COVID-19 to become known.

What we know now, however, is that as well as a large death toll, the nation’s mental health will be impacted. And a significant part of this will be the mental health of key workers.

I was pleased to see that a national helpline has been launched for NHS staff in England. Alongside this resource, I would encourage all our members to ask for and get support when they need it.

This could mean phoning a helpline or talking with your colleagues, friends or family. It could also mean getting in touch with your local Unite workplace reps or contacting me.

Such support is vital, and we will all need these support mechanisms over the days, weeks and months ahead.

We also thought about some of these issues when putting together the second episode of season two of The Mental Health Podcast.

I wanted to finish this update by once again saying thank you for all that you are doing at such an exceptionally tough time.

A failure of Boris and Matt

I often think of Frankie, I’ve done so again today.

Frankie was a mum and I was her health visitor for a while. She had a tough up-bringing which was combined with a tough adulthood. From a sneering public she would probably be characterised as a scrounger. She had near double figures of children and hadn’t ‘worked’ a day in her life. She was an amazing survivor though and her love for her children shone through her troubles.

I often worried about her mental health. I’d refered her for an assessment but got a letter a few weeks later saying she’d been discharged. I phoned up to find out why and they told me that to get seen she’d been sent a questionnaire that she needed to fill in and return.

Her literacy skills were limited and she would probably find it difficult to find the time to get the paperwork, many multiple pages, posted back. I asked whether they’d keep open the referral, send me the form and I’d visit her to fill it in.

In then end she got seen and could discuss some of the things that had happened to her in her younger days, including seeing a family member get murdered. I soon transferred to another caseload and, as they say, for me the rest became history.

The other way that we made her life difficult was getting her kids immunised. When I first met her, all of her children were not fully covered. Talking to the GP before I met her for the first time, they told me she had refused imms and was a lost cause. Distressing for the GP and practice staff as she affected their stats. I asked her about this.

She was a bit worried about the scares on TV, but in conversation it was more the fact that she kept getting these messages through the post, flimsy computer created request after flimsy computer created request, and didn’t really understand what it was all about.

I talked through all the different immunisations on offer, what they were for and how they would benefit her own and other people’s children. She said yes and over a few months I made regular trips to her house. By the end of my time with her, the whole family was up-to-date.

I’ve thought about Frankie again today as without me having the time to work with her she wouldn’t have got the support that made a difference to her children. Maybe I saved a few lives in that work, but it wouldn’t appear on anyone’s stats for that aspect (To be fair, I did get a letter of thanks from the chief executive for my iniative in improving imms rates as I did similar for other families).

This could be done because at the time I worked in a well resourced health visiting team, and we were encouraged to seek out health needs and do something about them. I think for many health visitors in England today, this wouldn’t be the case.

Last week I shared the depressing statistic that since health visiting entered local authority commissioning in October 2015, over 3,000 have been cut from the NHS. That equates to 31% of the profession.

On Saturday I travelled to Lincoln to support striking health visitors. As well as £2,000+ cuts to their pay, their job descriptions are also being forcibly changed. This will result, according to CPHVA experts, in the ‘level 1’ health visitor not actually needing the full range of skills that a qualifying health visitor actually needs. They will need to rely on a ‘level 2’ health visitor to supervise what they do. Some local authorities commissioning contracts also knock out the ability to bring in service innovation because it’s outside of the scope of what ‘should’ be done/is paid for.

Both of these things mean that what I could do for Frankie, couldn’t be done for families in future.

As reflected a few times on social media today (1, 2, 3), it’s terribly sad, but unsurprising, that Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock have not mentioned the important role that health visitors and school nurses do, and should in future, play on increasing immunisation coverage. It’s easier to talk about the failure of social media companies rather than to accept their own parties failures in cutting such a valuable service that actually could do much to make a difference. What a crying shame!

[Frankie isn’t really called Frankie. She was still amazing however!]

Mental Health Nursing journal February/March 2019 – Lead professional officer update

This update featured in the February/March 2019 Mental Health Nursing journal (Vol 39 #1). For those who aren’t members, you can buy your copy online via PocketMags.

I signed off my previous update by saying I couldn’t wait to see what 2019 had in store for us all. I hope you’ll agree that we’ve hit the ground running. After our successful 2018 conferences we’ve been developing some smaller education updates that we hope all mental health nurses will find of interest, and as we’re doing them online via the MHNA Facebook page, they’re easy to access and will remain a resource to look back at in the future.

The first was in response to a request from your MHNA Organising Professional Committee members to brief them on Unite’s Brexit position. Ben Norman, one of our researchers, covered this topic. The second session was based on a position paper that Mental Health Nurse Academics (MHNAUK) led on, Seeing Red. This focuses on period dignity in mental health services. The lead author Professor Liz Hughes and MHNA expert Nicky Lambert discussed its background, content and future. Unite has been pleased to support the work especially as it fits in with our own Period Dignity campaign. To watch either of these, or to hear about furture sessions visit www.facebook.com/UniteMHNA.

Campaign-wise, #WheresYourHeadAt, which is asking for a change to health and safety at work legalisation to mandate mental health first aiders alongside physical health first aiders, got its day in Parliament in a debate opened by Luciana Berger MP, president of the Labour Campaign for Mental Health.

This backbench business debate was co-sponsored by the Conservative MP Johnny Mercer and the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb. Afterwards, minister Jackie Doyle-Price MP took issue with concerns that I raised with her and if you want to look at the exchange of messages head over to http://bit.ly/2sTSH1L. Our friends at the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute also launched a new campaign, #DebtThreats, which is focused on the link between financial difficulty and suicide.

As you’d expect, we’re fully supportive of their campaign to stop the threatening language used towards people in debt. You can see more about the campaign and information from the launch event that journal editorial board member Vanessa Garrity and I attended at http://bit.ly/2Wy8WPx.

The NHS Long Term Plan

We had to wait until January to finally see the NHS (England) Long Term Plan get published. We’ve already covered some of the issues it raised in a news item (pages 6-7). I’ve also written some thoughts on the plan, which you can read at http://bit.ly/2Gc2J6k.

One major worry of the plan is that it’s pretty silent on workforce, kicking this issue into the medium-length grass. This is extra frustrating as Matt Hancock promised me that it would start to address the much-needed work in increasing mental health nurse numbers when I challenged him at the recent All Party Parliamentary Group for Mental Health (see http://bit.ly/2E1cHat).

I’ve been vocal about this since the plan was published, and have been invited to join the NHS Improvement led working sub-group on nursing and midwifery. I’ve also had discussions with Health Education England, ensuring that there’s no excuse for not making sure mental health nurses are central to future plans for mental health services.

Framework for Wales

Turning my focus to Wales, on 21 February chief nursing officer Jean White will be launching a new framework for mental health nursing in Wales (neu gallwch ei ddarllen yn Gymraeg). I’m hoping that we’ll have a report on this from the chair of the All Wales Senior Nurse Group, Hazel Powell. Keep your eyes on social media for the document on launch day.

I also attended the January NMC Council meeting, which was Andrea Sutcliffe’s first as incoming chief executive and registrar. In the Q&A session I raised the concerns that were discussed at the recent MHNAUK meeting, about the development of standardised regional practice assessment documents, and concerns that they are not as suitable for mental health nurse students. You can read my question and see some of the feedback I got at http://bit.ly/2SmjpP6.

I’ve also written to Andrea and NMC chair Philip Graf to ask them to meet with a delegation of interested mental health nursing organisation leads so they can be cognisant of our concerns and availability to assist with solutions. You can read that letter at http://bit.ly/2BfchKp.

As always, I’m just scratching the surface of activity. To get more updates on what I’m up to, make sure you follow me on Twitter @davidamunday. And as always if you’ve got any questions or comments please get in touch.

Mental Health Nursing journal December 2018/January 2019 – Lead professional officer update

This update featured in the December 2018/January 2019 Mental Health Nursing journal (Vol 38 #6). For those who aren’t members, you can buy your copy online via PocketMags.

As I write this update, I’m sat in the canteen at the House of Commons with a noisy group of school children rustling about next to me. It will be a week where I won’t spend too much time away from the building.

I’m here today because I’ve been at the joint All Party Parliamentary Group meeting of the ‘Conception to Age 2: First 1,001 Critical Days’ and ’Children’s’ groups. It was a stellar cast of speakers at the event including Dr Paul Williams MP, Norman Lamb MP, Tim Loughton MP, England’s children’s commissioner Anne Longfield, and leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom MP. There’s so much ‘buzz’ about early support and its importance.

This focus is welcome, highlighted further by the publishing of NHS Digital’s report on the mental health of children and young people in England. This, for the first time, quantified the prevelance of ‘disorders’ in the 2 to 4-year-old age category at 1 in 18 children.

According to the report, prevelance for older age groups increase with 1 in 10 of 5 to 10-year-olds, 1 in 7 of 11 to 16-year-olds and 1 in 6 of 17 to 19-year-olds. A good place to start with understanding the data is the 35 pages of mostly infographics that break down the information really easily.

Seni’s law

Yesterday’s trip was to the speaker’s house, where Unite had been invited to celebrate the passage of the Mental Health Units (Use of Force) private members bill, now an act.

We heard speeches from the minister Jackie Doyle-Price MP, the speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow MP, and architect of the bill Steve Reed MP, who pushed for this new legislation on behalf of his constituent, Olaseni (Seni) Lewis, who died in September 2010 after being restrained by 11 police officers at Bethlem Royal Hospital in south-east London.

We also heard from Seni’s mother and sister, who spoke of their determination to make sure that some good comes from his death. Interestingly this event happened the day before the anniversary of Unite meeting with Steve to offer our support to get the bill through parliament.

I’m also going to be meeting Dr Paul Williams MP to discuss a range of issues relevant to mental health in his role as a member of the House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee. This has been running an inquiry on the ‘first 1,000 days’ of a person’s life, to which Unite submitted evidence.

Delivering a petition

Still in Westminster, but this time at the beginning of October, I attended the parliamentary event coinciding with the delivery of the #WheresYourHeadAt petition to 10 Downing Street. At that point there was just over 200,000 signatures.

We heard about the next steps in the plan to get a debate in parliament in the next few months to look at changing the law around mental health first aid.

You’ll have seen in the pages of this journal (p5) that our chair Evri Anagnostara also signed up to a joint letter about the campaign alongside over 50 other organisational leaders, including Unite’s general secretary, Len McCluskey.

Hosting events

We’ve not just been busy in the Houses of Parliament over October and November, as we also held two conferences in London and Edinburgh. If you didn’t make it to these events, you’ve got the chance to look at the slides and watch the sessions from the Facebook Live recordings that were taken on both days.

It’s impossible to highlight all the different sessions that were covered over these two days, so take a look at online write ups that I did of both.

There has been much happening, and if you never want to miss out, make sure you sign up to the MHNA Twitter and Facebook pages and keep an eye on my activity on Twitter too. And if you’ve got any questions, comments or suggestions, do get in touch. You’ll also get much more information about all the above events that I’ve mentioned in my blog.

Finally, I just wanted to say merry Christmas and a happy new year to all our readers and Unite/MHNA members. The value of the work that you do is immense and you never get enough thanks for this!

I also wanted to say a big Christmassy thanks to all our MHNA Organising Professional Committee and MHN editorial board members. They have been a pleasure and delight to work with in 2018 and I can’t wait to see what 2019 has to challenge us all!

#MHNS18 – A write up of our Mental Health Nurses Association Scottish 2018 conference

If you’re just interested in the write up of the #MHNAS18, skip the first few paragraphs. There’s links to each of the FacebookLive sessions on the Unite/MHNA YouTube chanel and the speakers slides with each section.

On Monday 29th October, I was in Edinburgh for our 2018 Mental Health Nursing Association Scottish conference. With thoughts of our successful 2017 event in Dundee and our event a few weeks back in London, at the front of my mind, I had high hopes that we would have another successful event.

The build up to conference had gone well. We held 3 planning meetings where we’d been able to engage a number of students and staff from Napier University who helped to form the agenda and as well as inviting speakers to present, we also had a few contacts from people who wanted to offer their speaking services. It felt that we had a comprehensive agenda that would appeal to a wide cross section of students and qualified mental health nurses. In the end we had 166 sign up to attend.

The morning started with the customary stress of set up. Unlike the ‘old days’ where it would be limited to getting the chairs in the right place and making sure you’ve got a list of people to tick off, conference set ups for me now usually include making sure the tech is in place to make a fully engaging event which is beamed to the world look seamless. Again, there was tech problems with our live stream, with the connection dropping twice. I think this was an issue with wifi at the venue as when I swapped to 4G this problem resolved. This time, I complicated things by going for two live streams at one point, in the afternoon. This worked well apart from the App deciding to rotate the feed after a while which made one of our speakers look like they were presenting in the style of 1960’s Adam West Batman.

Our morning chair was Kenny Matthews. Kenny is the new Scottish representative on the MHNA Organising Professional Committee. He has recently taken on this role following the previous incumbent, Jim McGinn, stepping down.

YouTube video (Session 1 – Kenny Matthews)

Our first presentation was from Vanessa Garrity who, similar to our London event, spoke about social media, both in general and more specifically about todays event. It obviously made an impact as at the end of the event, we had a reach of 1.47 million impressions with 68 participants involved.

Next up, Monica Lennon MSP took to the stage. Monica is the new Scottish Labour spokesperson for health and sport. Similar to Kenny she is very new in post and the MHNA Scottish conference marked her first speaking event in her new brief. She covered a number of topics including the problem of inequality across Scotland, the frequency with which mental health now comes up in the Scottish Parliament and reflected on her own experiences of supporting family with their own ill health. I also liked the way that she threaded some of the tweets that we’d sent out over the days preceding the conference, and highlighted a really good blog from student mental health nurse, @MHnurseabby.

YouTube video (Session 3 – Monica Lennon MSP)

Next Paula Johns spoke about the work of the Scottish Mental Welfare Commission with a focus on their work on ‘Rights In Mind’ which is a pathway developing guidance on human rights and mental health. The document has overall guidance for peoples overarching rights but also looks more specifically at areas like key patients rights in the community, when being admitted to hospital and when on ward.

We then shifted to a different format where we had 90 minutes dedicated to holding a question time panel. One of our Mental Health Nursing journal editorial board members, Mike Ramsay took on the role of David Dimbleby to introduce the pre-submitted questions and to encourage delegates to come up with supplementary comments and questions.

Alongside Mike. We had 4 panel members; Dianna Manson, Stuart Martin, Dr. Karen Ozden and Freya Sewell.

Questions included ‘will advanced practice be a positive step for mental health nurses/nursing’, ‘does mental health nursing have a strong identity’, ‘should there be a focus on attracting men into mental health nursing’, ‘will the safer staffing legislation currently going through the Scottish Parliament be a positive step for mental health nursing’, ‘will the change to the Nursing & Midwifery Council standards move us towards more genericised care’ and for the third years mental health nurse students in the audience, ‘what were the main challenges faced by the newly qualified mental health nurses.

YouTube video (Session 5 – Question Time)

With the question time panel conclusion we then heard from Dana McCulloch who spoke about her experience of working with Social Bite, our caterers for the event. Social Bite is a social enterprise that is on a mission to end homelessness in Scotland.

YouTube video (Session 6 – Social Bite)

After delicious soup, and what I’m told were lovely sandwiches and salads, we split the event in to two streams. I missed the sandwiches as I spent time setting up the second stream for live-streaming. This increased the levels of tech complexity as it needed setting up a new camera. It mostly worked OK.

In the first session, delegates could either hear from Prof. Austyn Snowden who spoke about what nurses could learn from chaplains (alongside a ‘how to do a PhD in 5 minutes).

In the second stream, Stephanie McClymont and Angela McAuley spoke about their work on GAME. Although I stayed with Austin, I kept having a dip in to listen to the session downstairs.

In the second afternoon sessions, delegates were split between Karen McMahon who spoke about what nurses have to offer on the subject of eating disorders.

Christine Cather spoke in the second stream on how bibliotherapy can make a difference and her journey with Wee Read.

The streams then met again with Grant King speaking about applying the arts and humanities to nurse education. His session included sharing his new comic, ‘Lets Talk About Suicide’.

The final speaker was fellow Unite in Health lead professional officer, Gavin Fergie, who reflected on the days event and encouraged delegates to leave with momentum.

Reflecting on the day, again I feel we pulled together a great range of speakers. Similar to the recent #MHNAL18 and #CPHVAnw18 events I’ve ran, it’s been great that we’ve been able to run events that have been without cost to delegates, both Unite members and those that haven’t joined yet. Although to a lesser extent, this event was still frustrated by the number who had signed up to attend but didn’t end up coming with 73 of the 166 ‘checking in’ on the day. This will make running free events in 2019 even more difficult! We’ve had a few thoughts about how we limit this problem and it’ll be interesting to see how sucessful we are.