Pass card for the personalisation and recovery pathway
What we did
Coventry City Council has introduced a Pass Card as an integral component of their Personalisation and Recovery Pathway for people with mental health needs. The aims of the Pod Pass Card system are to:
- Enable people to manage their exit from secondary mental health services and the Pod as a secondary mental health provider service
- Increase people's personal resilience and reduce dependency on secondary mental health services
- Reduce use of mental health crisis or out of hour's services
- Enable the service to work with more people whose support requirements were critical and substantial.
The overriding aim has been to create a flexible point of re-accessing secondary mental health services through a system of 'virtual credits'. A person using secondary mental health services can be offered the Pass Card if they feel unsure about whether they are ready to exit the service. The Pass Card gives them virtual credits, which they can then use to re-enter secondary mental health services.
Why we did it
People had become dependent on the service and fearful of the impact that leaving direct and structured support offered by the services would have. The resultant impact of this was that people often remained on the books of the service for 10 years or more, they had become stuck, and as a consequence this made the service less attractive or relevant to people with more critical or immediate need. In part, the Pass Card was introduced to inform and enable both people the service was supporting and the practitioners that referred them to the service, to realize people's potential for recovery and the benefits of positive risk taking.
Outcome
Since its introduction the secondary mental health service has handled 451 referrals and 37 people have exited the service with a Pass Card. The initial cohort of people that used it to manage their exit from the service had all been dependent on the service (and secondary mental health services) for seven years or more. A recent survey of pass card recipients suggests that only 30% actually used the card to re-access services and of these only 20% used more than half the allocated credits. Further to this feedback and the reduced in service timescales achieved, the maximum duration of the Pass Card has been cut from 12 to 3 months thereby reducing a person's dependence on the service even sooner.
Contact details
Christine Eade
Manager, the POD
Internally Provided Services
Coventry City Council
Christine.eade@coventry.gov.uk Tel: 024 7678 6688