New building, same stigma

I have read over the years about the Castel Hospital, so why is it now they have the new building at the Oberlands to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness? The new building was going to be a fresh start for patients and families, a new attitude away from the old hospital. The move took 30 years with a lot of money spent.

I have spoken to patients who have gone through the system, the process, so why do the staff have the same attitude? For families who find themselves in difficult circumstances this is a very hard illness to deal with. The new building was going to help support families, also patients with a new approach to help and discuss a way forward.

I am very sorry and sad to say the stigma and attitude is still there and nothing has changed. Will anyone do anything about this or will the same nightmare be carried from the Castel Hospital?

There needs to be someone who cares about the illness of the mind other than just the money.

G. CLARK,

Sinclair,

Les Tracheries,

L'Islet,

St Sampson's,

GY2 4SP.

Editor's footnote: Ruby Parry, director of communities, replies:

Re: Response to anonymous (when sent for comment) patient concerns about Mental Health Services at Oberlands.

It is always difficult to receive such letters, especially when they are anonymous and therefore difficult to respond to, as we don't have any detail on which to comment. However, we do welcome feedback and we would not wish any service user, patient or family member to have a negative experience of our services, although we acknowledge that this might occasionally happen, particularly when people are unwell and perhaps not in agreement with the treatment offered.

The move to the new building is indeed a signal to the public, as well as to our patients and their families, that we want to reduce the stigma associated with poor mental health, and to continue to develop and improve the services we deliver to the community. We absolutely agree that a building alone cannot do that, and that what is most important is the attitude and practice of the staff who work within it, and we are seeking to embed a positive patient-focused culture in everything we do. The new Beacon cafe at Oberlands is an excellent example of this, as it offers patients the opportunity to socialise but also to develop real skills that support them into employment, and this has been hugely successful in this first few months of operation.

We do want to engage our patients and their families in developing the service further, and for this reason we carried out a service users' survey shortly after moving to Oberlands, and we intend to repeat this regularly. The survey results were hugely positive in that the vast majority of patients stated that they felt the move to the new building had greatly enhanced their experience of the service.

We regularly monitor both complaints and compliments across all of our services and compliments have by far outweighed complaints in the last few months. However, we know that many people will not make a complaint even if they don't believe that they have experienced a good service and we are also therefore introducing a new performance framework in mental health so that senior managers and the future Committee for Health and Social Services has clear evidence about the outcomes that are being achieved for those who use our services. This will include regular reporting on service user feedback about their experiences and their ideas for how the service might improve.

In the interim, all patients and their families are able to use our complaints process, to contact the senior manager or the clinical lead for Adult Mental Health, to use the comments boxes in the reception area and to join the service users' group to ensure that we are hearing and acting on feedback. We welcome this, both positive and negative, and would encourage people to let us know how we are doing. In saying that, it is always helpful to have the details about people's concerns as these are easier for us to investigate and to put right if we are getting things wrong.

I do hope that the author of the letter feels able to take one of these routes so that we can better understand the concerns they are raising.