News and Insights
Making mental health integral to health and care delivery
October 10, 2024
On World Mental Health Day, I am reminded of a meeting I had this week with Ellie Lindsay OBE, Founder of the Lindsay Leg Club Foundation and the architect of the Leg Club model of treatment for people with lower limb and leg ulcer related conditions.
Leg clubs provide lower limb management and treatment to members in non-clinical settings, where members are amongst others with similar treatment needs. They chat over tea and biscuits in a room, usually a community hall, where NHS nurses treat their legs according to strict hygiene guidelines. Members who want to be accorded privacy can be screened.
Making the difference: a connection with others
Ellie and I have had countless conversations about the benefits of the Leg Club’s holistic model of care, the challenges the clubs face and the impact they have on members. It’s the connection with other people that makes the difference. No longer isolated in their homes waiting for a community nursing team to clean, bandage and then move on to the next appointment, members respond well in this setting and this in turn has an impact on healing and recurrence.
Despite the evidence, this innovative approach to treatment has not become the norm for lower limb and leg ulcer treatment in the NHS. However, it is the link to mental health which is equally significant. My involvement with Suffolk Mind as a trustee helped me to grasp different approaches to mental health, specifically a better understanding of the mental health continuum.
A mental wellbeing scale
This is a simple and powerful way of thinking about mental wellbeing. The continuum means we can be at a different point on the mental wellbeing scale from one week, or day, to the next. It breaks from some of the ways we have talked about mental health in the past because we are all on the mental wellbeing scale.
There are many factors that contribute to moving us up and down the scale. Meeting our emotional needs contributes to mental wellbeing and feeling an emotional connection is one of the 12 physical and emotional needs. So, it is understandable why Leg Club members benefit from their attendance.
The challenge for health and care is that mental health has been partitioned into a separate set of pathways and services to deal with people who are in crisis, or have severe mental illness.
We know that mental illness also disproportionately affects people living in poverty, those who are unemployed and who already face discrimination. As a result, we encourage health and care commissioners to design services to meet their needs, which is understandable but doesn’t factor in the mental health continuum. In other words, everyone sitting in a GP waiting room, in A&E, or about to have an operation is on the continuum and where they are on the scale will impact the way they respond to treatment and indeed surgery.
This may change as we start to understand our own mental health needs better and can use technology to demonstrate to others where we are on the mental wellbeing continuum. In the same way that technology can help us monitor our physical health (e.g. blood glucose through sensors), we are starting to see the emergence of digital therapeutics which track wellbeing to help improve other aspects of our lives such as sleep. Making this information about our wellbeing available to health and care professionals would seem a sensible next step.
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POSTED BY: Julian Tyndale-Biscoe
