The Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) Mental Health Team is a relatively new service that has been operating within Primary Care for almost two years, and forms part of the Community Mental Health Transformation Programme.
The team are responsible for delivering timely access to an integrated, high quality, patient-centred service that enables people with mental health needs and/or social care problems to improve their well-being and functionality, with the aim of preventing, reducing or delaying the need for more specialist / secondary services.
The service supports 13 Primary Care Networks (PCNs) – covering a total of 71 GP Practices across the Trust area with a Mental Health Practitioner (MHP) assigned to each PCN. As well as MHPs, the team also has ten Support Time and Recovery Workers who work alongside MHPs to provide a recovery focussed approach to the mental health support that is offered.
This new level of service provides GPs with a dedicated in-house mental health resource with an expert knowledge and access to further Trust services to ensure patients are navigated to the right place at the right time. This benefits patients – by providing support in a setting in which they are familiar, and as a Trust works to reduce pressures on access and other services.
As well as mental health input the team work closely with other members of the wider practice team including Social Prescribers, and Health and Wellbeing Practitioners to deliver a multi-disciplinary approach. Chris Deaville, Mental Health Practitioner with the ARRS Team, explains:
“We aim to provide a smoother pathway for people, and a trusted assessment so that we can see patients in a primary care setting and signpost them to the support they need or make any necessary onward referrals.”
The ARRS Team are in the process of releasing vacancies to work within their service, for more information Combined staff can view these within Newsround and external applicants can view the role available currently here. To read more about the Community Mental Health Transformation Programme, visit the link here.
To hear from some colleagues who work within the AARS Mental Health Team, please watch the video below.