Over the last year the CPO Mental Health Service has undergone considerable transformation, with changes made to the allocation of funding, claiming process for extended consultations, referral processes, and interventions provided to patients. We are hopeful that these changes have be positive for our referrers and the population we care for.
Service Overview
Delivery of our service now aligns closely with our organisational values, there are principles of care which underpin our service delivery. Care is person centered, and trauma informed. We aim to minimise missed opportunities for intervention, avoid bouncing people between services i.e., any door is the right door, ensure the maintenance of a chain of care, and attempt to provide corrective experiences with a keen awareness of our services role in the clinical pathway.
This value-added service contributes to a heavy workload in coordinating service, we were very pleased to welcome two new staff members in February. We have now orientated our new staff members Michelle and Mel. People referred to our service currently receive a call from us within the week to discuss their needs and options for support. We continue to prioritise our target populations.
Extended Consultations
These claims are made through Halcyon. There are allocations to your practice according to enrolled population and identified high needs population.
Claims over and above your allocation are reviewed, to ensure our targeted populations receive support, discretionary funding can applied to the following target populations.
• Postnatal / Parenting
• Those declined at secondary /specialist services.
Please be aware we have no ability to review notes in your PMS, these must be in the Halcyon claim for us to be able to review. These notes are valuable in looking for discretionary criteria and being able to offer suggestions as appropriate for your patients.
Please Consider
Our funding for Individual counselling continues to be inadequate for our population, we continue to actively work with Te Whatu Ora regarding our level of resourcing. Within your practices your assistance in ensuring the people who most need our support are the ones referred, is most appreciated. If you have a HIP in your practice, please utilise their skills for the management of people who are presenting requesting mental health support in the first instance.
Our contract is for the provision of Brief Intervention, we cannot fund long term therapy or diagnosis, priority is given to those who have not accessed therapy previously.
If someone has already accessed therapy through our service on more than two occasions in recent years, please consider if it is time to refer to specialist services for support, outlining to them in your referral what services have already been delivered.
It is very important that those requiring urgent intervention are referred to the appropriate support, such as the Crisis team, who can respond urgently.
Our service is unable to provide support for people who already have counselling in place through ACC, or who are under the care of secondary services such as Community Mental Health.
While people pay for their consultation with referrers (except HIPS) they cannot be charged any additional fee to facilitate the referral. We have had people reporting they have been charged a fee for a referral letter, in addition to the consultation fee. This contrary to our contract with referrers, there should be no additional charge for people to be referred to our service. HIP time cannot be charged for as they are a fully funded service.
Coordination Support
Michelle Lowry comes to us with extensive experience as a psychiatric nurse both in the UK and New Zealand. Michelle has both clinical and management experience most recently working as Clinical Nurse Manager in Adult Community Mental Health and Addictions for Te Whatu Ora Lakes. Michelle is a passionate mental health clinician; we are very excited to have Michelle in our team, she will be a fantastic resource for our people and practices.
CPO Social Worker
We are pleased to have welcomed Mel Rundell as CPO MH Social Worker. Mel comes to us from Poutiri Trust where she has been working as a Dual Diagnosis Clinician. Melanie brings plenty of great experience from this work and has a fantastic reputation for delivering sound person-centered care. Melanie has now orientated to our service and is welcoming new referrals. With the opportunity to orientate a new staff member we have taken to opportunity to fine tune our service’s processes, Social Work is now embedded across the triage process, we actively look for cases where social work input could be beneficial to the person. Mel can assess and provide mental health intervention. Her role has a particular emphasis on the social determinates of health, access to resources, provision of advocacy, navigation of systems and services all underpinned by equity
We look forward to working with practices to meet the mental health needs of our enrolled population.
Ngā Mihi nui
Naomi Malcolm
Programme Lead
Primary Mental Health Service