In brief

A team at South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust and NHS Wandsworth have been working together on a project to improve the self management support available to people with depression. This project is part of our Co-creating Health programme.

Improving services for mental health and long term conditions have both been identified as priority areas for Wandsworth. Around 37,480 adults have at least one common mental health issue in the borough. With a high percentage of the population from minority ethnic groups this presents particular challenges, as research in the local community has highlighted problems with the perceptions and experiences of mental health disorders within these communities.

Local clinicians know that supporting people to self manage their depression improves their quality of life and helps to relieve the burden on the NHS. This is because it gives the person with the condition more control by encouraging them to set their own improvement goals.

The team delivered the three key elements of the Co-creating Health programme to embed a self management approach across the work of the trust at all points in the care pathway. Taking a whole system approach to improvement, the project delivered development programmes aimed at clinicians, and at people with depression. It also looked at how to change how services were delivered in order to support self management across the trust.

The site has focused predominantly on people who are being seen in secondary care but have also been working to promote self management with the wider community, liaising with user and voluntary groups to access hard-to-reach clients, including minority ethnic groups, prisoners and single parents on local estates. 

The project has been running since September 2007 and has already made significant progress. Now entering phase two, the team aim to continue to spread skills and knowledge about self management support, while also focusing on integrating the work they are doing with people with depression, clinicians and the redesign of services.