Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme (MHSIP)

The Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme (MHSIP) was a national programme aimed at improving the safety and outcomes of mental health care by reducing unwarranted variation and providing a high-quality healthcare experience for all people across the system by March 2024.

The programme had three workstreams:

• Reduce suicide and deliberate self-harm in inpatient mental health services, the healthcare workforce and non-mental health acute settings
• Reduce restrictive practice in inpatient mental health and learning disability services
• Improve sexual safety in inpatient mental health and learning disability services.

You can see a driver diagram for the MHSIP workstream here. 

How did we support delivery of the MHSIP?

We were excited to be working with mental health colleagues across Kent, Surrey and Sussex (KSS) to develop a Patient Safety Network aimed at:

• Working together: linking people with lived experience, teams and leaders to deliver the MHSIP workstreams.
• Building improvement capability in mental health teams across the network.
• Sharing learning, support improvements and safe cultures.

How did we optimise Quality Improvement Opportunities?

To enhance our local network we joined the South of England Mental Health Quality and Patient Safety Improvement Collaborative (MHC). The Collaborative supports individuals, teams and organisations to build skills and knowledge about quality and safety improvement, creates space and time to work on safety issues, and provides opportunities to continually learn from each other. This provided a regional forum for support, learning and sharing for the KSS MH Patient Safety Network. Together we worked with the Quality Coaches from the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH).