THE manager of a local mental health charity believes Swindon is not being served well by the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership.

Kathleen Aitkeen, manager of Swindon Mind, has written a critique of the AWP draft Quality Account, drawing on her experiences of working with the mental health service.

Kathleen says that since two homicide reports relating to Swindon AWP patients were published in November, with approximately 60 recommendations, AWP chief executive Laura McMurtrie had written a letter saying that most of them had been addressed and the rest were on course to be implemented.

However, in her critique, Kathleen describes the situation as ‘extremely disturbing’.

“The letter did not provide any evidence of how or when these improvements were made and as far as we are aware, her statement about progress does not reflect the true picture,” she said.

“Earlier this year the SHA sent in a team to assess how the Swindon services were functioning. They found that the same issues existed as were there at the time of the homicides. This is extremely disturbing.

“There is also a major problem about the number of targets workers have to meet and record. One issue that needs to be addressed is that AWP appear to have developed their own targets in addition to those that the Government impose. This means that staff are stressed and also have less time to spend supporting service users.”

She said Swindon mental health services are not being served well by AWP because the Trust covers too large an area which meant local circumstances are being ignored.

Despite this conclusion, she praised the ‘dedicated and skilled staff working for AWP in Swindon’.

“If they were working within the right culture they could do an excellent job,” she said.

“Sadly, at the moment that is not the case but could be with a different approach at HQ.

“In December a new locality manager, Thomas Kearney, was appointed and he quickly identified problems in the way the crisis team was working. He arranged a week’s training for the staff and this has produced good results.

“Thomas appears to have the energy, enthusiasm and the skills to make a difference to the services in Swindon.

“However, he needs enough autonomy to be able to use these attributes, otherwise my fear is that he will not stay.

“Commissioners need to act quickly to plan the way forward for the future of mental health services in Swindon. The present situation should not be allowed to continue.”

In the AWP draft Quality Account, Laura said they are committed to delivering in full and maintaining any standards set in the past two years.

She said: “In particular, we recognise that our work with carers requires continued improvement to achieve the standards we all want and although we have made significant improvements in the accessibility and responsiveness of our services we need to improve further.”