A new mindset for mental health design

 Jonathan Baillie discusses with the Trust’s estates and facilities management (EFM) director, Chris Parsons, his team’s achievements so far and future aspirations.

Formed following the 2006 merger of the County Durham and Darlington Priority Services NHS Trust and the Tees and North East Yorkshire NHS Trust, the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys (TEWV) NHS Foundation Trust is today one of England’s largest mental health Trusts, covering an area stretching from Scarborough in the east to Barnard Castle in the west. The Trust is headquartered at Darlington’s West Park Hospital, a PFI-financed mental health facility with 110 ground floor single bedrooms for adult, elderly and intensive care patients, that forms the centre of an award-winning mixed-use development two miles outside Darlington. The hospital has now been open nearly three and a half years. Estates and facilities management is co-ordinated, however, from the 350-strong estates team’s offices at the Earls House Hospital site in Durham. There currently, in another PFI project, contractor BAM Construct is building an adjacent 76-bed mental health facility, recently renamed Lanchester Road Hospital, with a scheduled completion of October this year. Trust EFM director Chris Parsons is a former Army catering manager who spent over 20 years in the forces before joining the Trust 10 years ago. Although reluctant to take all the credit, he has clearly driven many of the estates policies which saw the Trust gain its 2008 BBH Award in November.

Accommodation ‘fit for the 21st Century’
A strong believer that, “in the 21st Century, people with mental health problems should be treated in comfortable, safe, secure and welcoming accommodation conducive to the fastest possible recovery”, he admits one of his team’s biggest challenges has been “working to heal the wounds caused by poor NHS investment decisions in the mental health arena over the past 25 years”. He explains: “While in the mid- and late 1980s some outdated Victorian-built mental health facilities were still operating, with the advent of new NHS policy directives there was a sudden rush to close old, outdated asylums. Unfortunately, the immediate aftermath was not a great time for mental health provision, with use of some inappropriate premises, and generally inadequate estate maintenance.” Back to the present and, asked why he believes the Trust beat off stiff competition from acute and PCT Trust entrants to win the BBH Best Estates Strategy award, he attributes the success to a combination of reasons, not least the fact that, not only were the judges impressed by the Trust’s 2007-2012 estates strategy, but they could also see that the previous five-year strategy had “begun delivering on the promises we’d made and achieved a high level of staff and patient satisfaction”.