Mental Health

Penny West leads the mental health consultancy.   She has many years’ experience as a manager and as a consultant in mental health services, working independently and as an associate of the Centre for Mental Health Services Development, King's College London; the Health and Social Care Advisory Service and more recently the Mental Health Foundation. (See Consultant CVs page for more details.)

Penny’s passion is promoting change in mental health acute inpatient care and across the system in community teams, statutory and voluntary services.   She was the programme manager for the CMHSD National Acute Inpatient Practice Development Network (1998-2003) and has since worked with Local Implementation Teams, inpatient and community teams to help systems become more service user and recovery focused. (Again, see Projects page for more details.)

Penny can offer solution focused awaydays and team building events, longer-term action learning sets, or system wide events using open space technology and reflective learning.   She has worked with teams experiencing difficulties, provided one-off debriefing opportunities and led multi-agency reviews and strategy development.   Penny is keen to promote solution focused approaches on wards and in community teams, which can be quickly learned by staff and equip them to respond to what service users want to promote their recovery.

When might you need support from Orchard Solutions?

Teams

§       To support teams in reviewing their progress, or in addressing specific, multi-agency or inter-professional challenges: such as awaydays or team building events: specifically designed for your needs.

§       To work with peer groups such as senior or middle managers, ward managers, CMHT managers, or other groups in the implementation of change: for example this might be with a one-day event, a three day solution focused training programme, or a year-long action learning set.

§       To provide one-off confidential debriefing/support to teams who have experienced a serious untoward incident – to help team members address their feelings/ concerns and recover their resources.

Organisations

§       To support an organisation in consulting your stakeholders to ensure the voice of service users are central to your future direction.  This may be a one-off event or as part of a wider review.

§       To initiate joint working between employment services and mental health services (Penny is a co-author of the HASCAS Working for Mental Health Learning Materials and was one of the leads in development and piloting the materials in Manchester.)

§       To provide support with a system-wide review of your service or to promote system-wide culture change.

Individuals

§       To provide a manager, or senior clinician, with external mentoring/coaching to help build their resources, with a consultant who is sensitive to the demands on senior staff and knowledgeable about the context of mental health change.

§       To help resolve conflict through the provision of independent workplace mediation between individuals, or groups; or to provide team consultation to help a team that is ‘stuck’.