NEWS


NHS England pledges £1bn a year to improve mental healthcare


The NHS in England has committed to ‘the biggest transformation of mental healthcare across the NHS in a generation’, pledging to help over a million extra people, and to invest more than £1 bn annually by 2020/21. The announcement – on 15 February – came in response to the final report of the independent Mental Health Taskforce established in March 2015 by the NHS as part of its Five Year Forward View. Titled Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, the report gives ‘a frank assessment’ of the state of current NHS mental healthcare – emphasising that ‘annually, mental ill health costs the economy,


the NHS, and society, £105 bn’. Its recommendations include a ‘three-pronged’ approach to improving care – through prevention, the expansion of mental healthcare – including ‘seven-day access in a crisis,’ and ‘integrated physical and mental healthcare’. The Taskforce suggests, ‘and the NHS accepts’, the need to invest over £1bn a year of additional funding in NHS care by 2020/21 to reach one million more people – in addition to the previously announced new funding for children, young people, and perinatal care. With the number of referrals to CAMHS


services rising five times faster than the growth ‘Powerful’ lone worker protection system


Skygd, a Swedish provider of lone working solutions, and Atus Systems, a UK provider of paging and on-site staff alarm systems, have announced a UK branding partnership under which Atus has branded the Skygd Personal Safety Alarm product as Atus Defender, and added BS8484 compliance to the Android service.


Atus explained: “The unique lone worker protection system with indoor positioning is


based on a modern cloud-based architecture for alarms and associated services. The system’s powerful construction and flexible structure make it fast and secure, so it can be easily deployed without additional costly on- site infrastructure. It can be self-managed and used easily by alarm response centres (ARCs) and in-house control rooms.”


Darren Swindlehurst, Atus Systems MD, added: “Skygd has developed and owns all the intellectual property rights to a unique indoor positioning solution that pinpoints exactly where an alarm has been triggered inside a building, positioning us perfectly to jointly deliver a compliant solution to our customers. The Skygd solution has been providing lone worker protection and indoor positioning to Swedish customers since 2008, and we are delighted to be able offer this powerful solution to the UK market.”


Liking the sound of it


Ecophon says its new range of Akusto One vertical independent sound absorbers are ‘easy to install, and ideal for creating spaces where both exceptional acoustics and aesthetics are required cost-effectively’.


Designed to reduce echoes, enhance speech


clarity, and improve acoustic performance, the sound absorbers come in ‘design-friendly smaller dimensions’, in different sizes, shapes, and colours. The panels are available in circular, rectangular, and square shapes; all are 40 mm deep and complemented with white or grey painted edges. Ecophon said: “Using these standard shapes in combination, innovative designs and patterns can be created on the wall, improving both acoustics and aesthetics.” Depending on the environment, the panels can be produced in either a smooth, easily cleaned surface – ‘with colours inspired by nature’ – or a fabric textured finish ‘with a more colourful, and recently revised, on-trend palette


of the corresponding workforce between 2013/14 and 2014/15, the Taskforce says the £1.4 bn (over five years) committed for children and young people’s mental health ‘should be invested to ensure that by 2020 at least 70,000 more children and young people


have access to high quality care’. Meanwhile, with only half the country offering ‘24/7’ community-based mental health crisis services, new funding should be made available ‘so that by 2020/21 Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams (CRHTTs) can offer intensive home treatment as an alternative to acute inpatient admission in each part of England’. The Taskforce added: “New funding should ensure that by 2020/21 no acute hospital is without all-age mental health liaison services in emergency departments and inpatient wards, and that at least half of acute hospitals meet the ‘core 24’ service standard.”


‘Home from home’ in


wet environments Altro’s new Altro Pisces is a wet environment safety flooring for shoes and bare feet which ‘combines all the benefits of safety flooring with the look and feel of home’, and the first flooring to be developed with new AltroBead technology, ‘giving a soft and domestic feel developed with comfort, warmth, and relaxation in mind, and avoiding the clinical feel that some home-from- home environments create’. Altro said: “With a Pendulum Test Value


(PTV) of ≥50, a soft-look finish, and 16 attractive shades, Altro Pisces allows users to bridge the gap between high-performance safety flooring and demands for domestic-style flooring. For each shade, tiny beads in three carefully selected hues are blended and evenly distributed into the flooring on top of the base colour, giving the consistent, soft appearance you would expect and want from domestic interiors.” Altro Pisces has been designed ‘to fit


perfectly’ with Altro Whiterock hygienic wall cladding, forming a sealed, watertight system for enhanced safety and hygiene. The new flooring provides slip-resistance ‘of one in a million’ against common contaminants found in wet environments including shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel (tested using slider 96 (shoes) and slider 55 (bare feet)).


for expressive wall or screen solutions’. For ‘more challenging’ spaces, impact-resistant wall panels and trims are available. Made from ‘third generation high-density glass wool, with no added formaldehyde and high recycled content’, the panels have been tested and classified as non-combustible according to EN ISO 1182. ‘Lightweight yet very robust’, they are installed using Ecophon’s iConnect One accessories, for ‘perfect mounting’.


THE NETWORK Ap r i l 2 016 5


Courtesy of NHS England.


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