This is the six monthly report that I sent to the Contracts Unit and we at the MHUForum have dicided that we will in futre publish all our futre reports on line on this websires

  

Progress and Financial Report  

(April  –  September 2009)

 

The Eradication of the Service User Movement

 

Gareth Wynne Jones :- Administrator

 

Company Limited by Guarantee / Cwmni Cyfyngedig Drwy Warant Rhif /No 3163851

April to September  2009
As you might be aware our funding from the partnership (Gwynedd local health Board, Gwynedd & Ynys Mon Councils ) ceased in September 2008. We are currently running on our reserves, but have been required to spend all of our remaining finances on the Wellbeing Project. The MHUForum has been successful in becoming an approved tender on the new Engagement Gateway Project, but without core funding we won’t be able to tender for any of the up and coming £25k projects, with the £75K projects it is allowable to take some costing out for office costs and wages, but we won’t have any resources to use for the match funding. This means that spending all our reserves on the wellbeing project will result in us having no reserves at all by March 2010 so effectively the partnership will have forced the Mental Health Users Forum to close its doors and the result will be that there will not be an independent group in existence in North Wales that looks after the needs and interests of the mental health service users in relation to service development and provision.  

The current Involve project (Service Users and Carers Project) in my opinion has become unfit for purpose, or should I say never was fit for purpose. The Partnership has put all its eggs in one basket (about 70,000 of them apparently) but the project worker has, after only a year in post left the project, but this project never really got off the ground as it’s main aim and purpose in my opinion was to aid the partnership in ticking all it’s boxes, there was no real concern in supporting the User and the agency that won the tender is not user orientated anymore and therefore couldn’t attract any service users onto it’s database in Gwynedd or Ynys Mon.
When the MHUForum received the initial tender for the new Service Users and Carers Strategy, the list of obligations was out of the ordinary, it included everything bar the kitchen sink. It was concluded by the MHUForum that we could not fulfil the obligations even with an additional 2.5 new staff and felt that we could not precede with the tender in it’s current form. I am firmly of the belief that the Involve project has not fulfilled its obligations and at £70,000 (apparently) is a disgrace. How long can they claim that they are still developing the project? Every meeting that I have been in, that well trodden phrase comes out that “we are still developing the project” and we have several people on our database. Shouldn’t they (Unllais) have gone some way in developing the project when they had the first Service User Involvement Development Worker (SUIDW)? Shouldn’t they have had people on the database then? Good money wasted, when it could have been better spent on maintaining and developing existing projects( The Users Forum) that supplied users for panels for service development and also offers and provides additional support to the Service Users of Gwynedd and Ynys Mon.

I call for an investigation into the development and implementation of this new service users and carers strategy, even though our name was on it we where not involved in its development. The MHUForum didn’t know anything about it till it appeared in draft form in my inbox during the xmas holiday 2007.  I had to gatecrash the task and finish group to find out that it was our funding that was to pay for half of it.

Questions need to be answered

  1. A new service users and cares strategy was put in place and this was done behind closed doors involving the very people who won the tender.
  2. There was no consultation with users on this strategy.
  3. This tender was so all encompassing that the amount of money that was on offer for its funding was believed by us at the MHUForum not sufficient, significantly so!  If you already had an organisation that functioned in the mental health area then you could most probably use the resulting data from that organisation(s) to fulfilled contractual obligations on another, so I suppose that saves money, but is that allowed, is it fair, is it legal?
  4. Unllais won the contract and they would be supplying the service users in future for all panels/groups in Gwynedd and Mon. It is now November 2009 and to my knowledge the new project has not supplied one service user for any group, but I might be uninformed on this, but prove me wrong.
  5. The MHUForum got kicked off all e-mail lists and invitations from the partnership. But when the Involve project couldn’t supply any users then we got put back on e-mail lists and sought for meetings (Anglesey & Gwynedd Strategy Development Group (Gwynedd Service Improvement Group) Adult Mental Health Services (AMI)) but after my last attendance I received an e-mail from Martin Davidson making claim that after I left the meeting they discussed the appropriateness of the MHUForum at future meeting. This was not an agenda item, or I would have stayed till the end. Mr Davidson claims that they as a group decided that it would be inappropriate for the MHUForum to attend future meetings. I know for a fact that this did not occur at the meeting as Jan Walker one of our directors was there, and this item did not come up for discussion.  How can it be, for an organisation with over two hundred mental health service users on its members database be “inappropriate” to attend and represent those members?
 

The treatment of the MHUForum by some of the funders has been contemptible and shows how tokenistic and false the relationship has been over the years.
I was told that the MHUForum was not effective and that we sent the same people to the same meetings all the time. In my book that’s called continuity of supply and a dedicated volunteer base. It takes time for any user, or for that matter a statutory worker, to get to grips with the running of a meeting, to get to understand all the high level language used at those meeting, (the terminology) and the other members of that group and their function in the different areas in the mental health field. A ridiculously insulting statement on our efforts. 

The withdrawing of funding and forcing the MHUForum to spend all it’s reserves has been very short sighted of the partnership (Local health Board, Gwynedd and Ynys Mon Councils) considering that the way forward for treatments has been determined and will be based significantly on home treatment orders. It is the opinion of the MHUForum that the individuals put under these orders will need more support from groups like the MHUForum, but the reality for these individuals will be that they will be isolated within their homes (in some cases the possible source of their mental trauma/difficulties) and the wider community.


The support for mental health service users available at the moment in Gwynedd and Mon  is woefully insufficient. During the last 6 months the MHUForum has been getting on average at least 2 phone calls a week from people looking for support groups, depression support being the most requested. There is not a single depression support group in Gwynedd or Ynys Mon but fortunately those in the Arfon area I am referring to the Bi-polar group, which is not really the group for depressives but the facilitator has agreed to facilitate them but is in agreement that action needs to be taken to sort this situation out and the sooner the better. We at the MHUForum had intended to start up a depression group at our Menai Bridge office, but we don’t have the resources to do so anymore.

To conclude:
The partnership should be ashamed of its antics towards the MHUForum, but the people in the positions of determining the mental health services for Gwynedd and Mon are so arrogant in their positions that they fail to see the real value a group like the MHUForum can contribute to the betterment of the mental health service users lot.
The last Strategy group meeting I was at, I was trying to get our funding put back on the table. Alyson Moylst stopped me in my tracks and stated that the group had already dealt with this issue and that it would not get put back on the table. The next statement that came out of her mouth was that she wanted to reintroduce a topic back on the table. As one of Kathryn Tate’s characters would say “what a *****  liberty”      This new service user carers strategy and those who colluded in it’s manufacture have effectively silenced the users voice in Gwynedd and Ynys Mon and I think that it will take a lot of work for it to ever recover.

There used to be a time when a group would approach a funder and ask for funding to carry out its activities and they would get funding, ring fenced for years. I am not saying that it should return to that way of working, but the situation now is that the money is there if we carry out activities that the funder wants. If there is no user input into developing those services/activities then they will be so far removed to give benefit to the service users that the group that carries them out will not be able to attract members/clients.

The MHUForum has a constitution and it’s aims and objectives are very specific, but like many a group who needs funding they will work outside of their aims and objectives just to obtain funding. The situation has gone too far in favour of the funders and their “business models”. How about meeting us half way? Then we would not be breaking our own constituted rules. How can a group who operates outside it’s constitution prove to the charity commission that it’s activities are for the public good if they can not evidence it from their own activities?

            I personally think that this situation is going to get worse as it seems to me that all the big boys; Haval, Mind, Journeys, Unllais, Bipolar Cymru etc are attracting all the funding and they are more interested in paying their own wages with the funds rather than provide services. Also, it is becoming evident that when there are paid staff in a project, they can not retain their volunteers, and they end up restricting their services due to not having basic volunteer cover. Two members of staff cannot supply the same cover as half a dozen volunteers. So funding the larger staffed organisations is resulting in voluntary groups folding as they are not given basic core funds. If it is left to carry on like this, in a few years there won’t be any smaller volunteer lead groups left in North Wales and all the local branches of the nationals will be run from Cardiff. Early October I went to Cardiff to meet a friend and I took the opportunity to pop into The Bipolar Cymru launch of their new link project at City Hall with Edwina Hart AM Guest speaker
The MDF Bipolar Cymru group has won £700,000 Lottery Fund cash  to help people with Bipolar Disorder. Now this is an all Wales group but lo and behold this service stops at Aberystwyth WHY? Responses I was getting ranged from “Oh it’s very rural there isn’t it” to “there aren’t that many people there are there”

Whats that all about then? can someone explain it to me?

Membership

Membership currently for Gwynedd and Mon stands at 210

Conferences

We don’t have money for conferences anymore.

Newsletter

We don’t have money to produce a newsletter anymore

WebSite

Representation

Owing to the Involve project still being developed and to my knowledge no service users have been sent to any group we are still  sending User/Reps to the following:-

  1. Hergest patients’ council..
  2. Bangor University school of Social Work Service, Service User Carer group, which feeds into the social work degree from initial interview for a place to final assessments in year three. I have started lecturing on Perspectives in Mental Health. to year 3 students and have been assessing module presentations on behalf of the Mental health Users Forum.
  3. M.I.C. Mesur Iechid Cymru. User input into the translation of English questionnaires / health measures into Welsh…. First one we did was the Becks depression scale.
  4. R&D Psychology Unit, Bangor University. Getting more talking therapies into the Hergest. Did you know that they don’t have any therapists coming in to the Hergest to do talking therapies, They don’t have the money for it…….
  5. CRC Cymru Involving People (Wales wide research network)
  6. Wales collaboration for Mental Health
  7. CIM  Cyngrhair Iechyd Meddwl
  8. Mental Health User Network.

We have had to cut back from quite a few group as we can’t afford the travel expenses to attend all that we used to. It is through our attendance at meetings and our activity on these panels, groups and bodies that issues relating to, or raised by our members, are taken forward.

Wellbeing Project(s)

To date up to September, we have completed 8 Wellbeing projects 399 attendances at an average 49 attendances per monthly wellbeing project.

Gareth Wynne Jones (Administrator)

On behalf of The Mental Health Users Forum