Supplementary memorandum submitted by
Department of Health
COMMISSION GREEN PAPER ON EU MENTAL HEALTH
STRATEGY
It was a pleasure to meet you and the Committee
members on 14 December and I hope you found the session useful.
I said I would write with comments on two questions that we did
not have time to discuss, and with some more information about
our plan for race equality in mental health care. I would also
like to expand slightly on what I said about codes of practice
for dealing with mental illness in the workplace.
CO -ORDINATION
OF ACTIVITY ACROSS
THE COUNTRIES
OF THE UK
The Committee was interested in the scope for
formalising co-operation between England, Scotland and Wales,
and whether co-operation within the context of an EU strategy
would affect that relationship.
In the post-devolution world it is, of course,
entirely appropriate for the UK countries to have their own mental
health strategies. My colleagues in the Welsh Assembly and the
Scottish Executive independently play a very active and constructive
role on health issues within Europe and I am sure they will continue
to do so. At the same time, we still collaborate successfully
between ourselves—on our response to the Green Paper, for
example—and we do have some mechanisms for co-operation
more generally. There have been two UK governmental conferences
on mental health and I believe another is planned for 2008. Occasionally
we take a UK-wide approach: Scotland has a good programme called
Mental Health First Aid, which raises awareness of mental health
issues and is about to be spread to England and Wales.
PEOPLE WITH
LEARNING DISABILITIES
The Committee wanted to ask whether we felt
that the needs of people with learning disabilities should be
embraced by the EU mental health strategy.
There are clear links and connections between
the issues facing people with a mental illness and those with
a learning disability. For example, the Department of Health is
currently working on its response to a report produced here by
the Disability Rights Commission that highlights the serious and
unnecessary inequalities in physical health that both groups experience.
But ultimately they are two different conditions, and we don't
think that service users would necessarily appreciate being bracketed
together in a single strategy.
DELIVERING RACE
EQUALITY IN
MENTAL HEALTH
CARE
We spoke about the delivering race equality
action plan that we launched in January 2005, and the focused
implementation sites (FISs) that are leading the development of
good practice. There are currently 17 FISs across England, each
of which has set its own local priorities for reaching the national
objectives set out in the action plan. It is still relatively
early days, but I have been genuinely impressed with the amount
of very promising work they have begun.
For example, in Plymouth the FIS is establishing
an entirely new counselling service for the local BME communities,
helping to extend a wider choice in services to people who may
not have been able to choose before; in Trafford, the FIS has
helped to set up a new support service for carers from the African
Caribbean community, offering access to culturally sensitive support
groups, access to training and opportunities to take short breaks;
and in Birmingham the FIS is helping to redesign the processes
for commissioning mental health services to make sure they reflect
all patients' perspectives and needs.
EMPLOYERS' CODE
OF PRACTICE
I thought I should reiterate that the Action
on Stigma document that we launched in October sets out our latest
guidance to employers on promoting mental health and ending discrimination
at work. While some of it is voluntary, it will certainly help
employers to comply with their new duties under the Disability
Discrimination Act. The Act includes mental illness in its definition
of disability, and requires public sector bodies to produce equality
schemes demonstrating how they will protect and promote the rights
of disabled employees.
December 2006
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