Older People's Mental Health Beds

Health Scrutiny looked at this earlier in the month. A few quick points:

1. We are likely to see less beds than are currently at Malvern Ward at Sutton Hospital and at Franklin House. Instead of 34 Continuing Care beds and 6 Respite beds there will be 24 Continuing Care beds including 6 Respite beds.

2. The options have been reduced from 5 to 3, effectively proposing the closure of Malvern Ward:

Option 2 - Provide NHS managed continuing care beds and Challenging Behaviour Unit at Franklin House. I suspect the NHS and Council will not want this.

Option 4 - NHS managed beds at another facility. Funnily enough St Helier Hospital is about to get tid of 2 beds and close 6 wards. They will have the space. This could be used as the thin end of the wedge to downgrade St Helier Hospital and transfer more mental health services to it. Alternatively Epsom Hospital may be chosen as the site, however that is much further away.

Option 5 - Continuing Care beds commissioned from independent sector. I suspect this will take too long to procure to save money.

I suspect the next option appraisal will reduce this down to Options 4 and 5 with 4 being agreed with 5 as a fallback.

Thus we could intermediate care at Carshalton War Memorial, mental health developing at St Helier and perhaps a local care centre at Wallington. Maybe in February the Royal Marsden Doctors London Review will suggest a small (30-50 patient a day) CCH at the Royal Marsden site.