New Roles

A number of new roles have already been introduced into mental health on a national basis, both to help expand the overall workforce across health and social care and to tailor roles to meet the specific needs of service users and carers. These include:

• Support, Time and Recovery (STR) workers, who support service users by giving them time and so help their recovery. Three pieces of national guidance have been published. First, there was the original Department of Health Mental Health Policy Implementation Guide: Support, Time and Recovery (STR) Workersof 2003. DH Publication Ref 30742. This was supported by a national implementation programme and the learning from this has been set out in the second publication in 2007 - A Final Handbook, DH Publication Ref 284915. As readers can see from the attached letter, the national implementation team also produced a STR Manual and Toolkit that provides additional material for the introduction of new roles into the mental health workforce.
  
  And finally A Competence Framework has been published in 2008. DH Publication Ref 288773. The relevant Equality Impact Screening Assessment and Action Plan are set out below.
  
  To help support the development of the STR role, please see attached the STR portfolio documents. They are intended to be used to complement your organisations documentation and not to replace them but you mind find them useful to update and further develop existing portfolios."
  
  

  STR Portfolio

  The guidance notes and templates contained in the STR portfolio were developed to provide a framework, and to support a consistent approach to the personal and professional development of STR workers. Developed from lessons learnt and examples of good practice the documents are provided for guidance only and should compliment organisations existing documentation. Please click here for access to the documents STR portfolio documents.



• Primary Care Mental Health Workers, who are intended to provide brief psychological interventions, signpost and improve mental health clinical governance in the primary care team for people with common mental health problems in all age groups;14 DH (2003): Fast Forwarding Primary Care Mental Health: Graduate Primary Care Mental Health Workers: Best Practice Guidance. DH Publication Ref 30366.



• Community development workers (CDWs) for black and minority ethnic (BME)




The role of the CDWs is to act at a strategic level as a change agent; a service developer; a capacity builder; and access facilitators for the whole of the BME community. Three pieces of national guidance have been produced: - Mental Health Policy Implementation Guide: Community Development Workers for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities: Interim Guidance(2004) DH Publication Ref 265796. Mental Health Policy Implementation Guide: Community Development Workers for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities: Education and Training - Supplementary Guidance. (2005) DH Publication Ref 271259. and the Mental Health Policy Implementation Guide: Community Development Workers for Black and Minority Ethnic Communities: Final Handbook.(2006) DH Publication Ref 278271.



You can download the summary of the role of the BME CDWs here.



To find out more about the DH Delivering Race Equality (DRE) in Mental Health Care Programme, please click here to go to the relevant website.



• Carer support workers,18 DH (2002): Developing Services for Carers and Families of People with Mental Illness. DH Publication Ref 29778. who provide support to carers of people with mental health problems through assessment, provision of care and development of networks.
  
  Other new roles designed to help meet specific skills gaps, as well as to help cover local recruitment needs, have been introduced on a local basis and include:



• Assistant and Associate Mental Health Practitioners, who provide a mixture of clinical and other healthcare interventions in various settings, including in-patient care;



• Psychology associates, who are concerned primarily with offering therapeutic interventions in a specialist field, usually described by protocol;



• Case managers in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Doncaster national demonstration site, to work with people with anxiety and depression within a ‘stepped care’ model; and



• Peer Supporters – people in recovery who support others who are experiencing mental distress within the context of the principles of social inclusion.

The Psychology Associate Pilot Project in the North of England

Individual Peer Supporters

Specialist Nurse Practitioner