Provision of Specialist Mental Health Support in the Community for Ethnically & Culturally Diverse Communities

This commission is available to VCSE organisations providing effective specialist mental health services for ethnically and culturally diverse communities in recognition of their vital role in responding to the pandemic, ongoing system pressures and supporting some of the most acutely ill and vulnerable patients. This specification sets out how this service will continue to build on and further deliver the ambitions set by people for our services. As such, we will continue to work with our providers to further shape and transform the service and the system of support. It is expected that through the Specialist Mental Health Support in the Community for Ethnically and Culturally Diverse Communities, more people receive appropriate interventions at the right place, in a highly responsive and culturally competent manner. Our ambition is to move away from a system that is based on thresholds and tiers to enable people to access information, advice, support and care based on their needs. Working together with people accessing our services, their carers, with staff and stakeholder partners, we shared experience and expertise on understanding how we improve the support available. The result is we have adopted, and adapted, the evidence-based model called i-Thrive to provide a systemic framework for our services to support children, young people, adults and older adults to be happy, healthy at home and have agreed a series of clear guiding principles to deliver and improve our support.