Joint working between providers and the NHS to support student mental health

Students who experience mental health problems need a single experience of care as they move from university support to NHS provision, as set out in Universities UK’s ‘Minding our future’ report (2019).

This unified service must be underpinned by shared data and informed by an agreed assessment of local need. It should start with conversations between students, higher education institutions and local care services to describe strategic relationships, working together on the basis of agreed values to achieve a shared set of outcomes.

As part of a higher education provider’s work to support integration of mental health support for students, they should actively engage with their local area’s suicide prevention strategy and associated network. These will typically be led by local public health, primary care and/or mental health services and are designed to reflect the needs of local communities.

Recommendations for higher education providers:

• Develop strategic relationships with local NHS services, to organise services locally and address issues as they arise
• Assessment of student and service need should be based on relevant data and published evidence
• Strategic relationships should bring together the appropriate skills, experience and expertise to meet the needs of students
• The design of services and pathways of care should be informed by engagement with students

We would also highlight the recommendations made within the University of Sheffield and University College London’s SPEQS toolkit, developed as part of the Student Mental Health Partnerships Project led by UWE Bristol:

• Collect and share data: developing data collection strategies to underpin service evaluation. Enabling secure data sharing where appropriate, to facilitate decisions about student care. The term ‘data’ can refer to information from clinical practice (e.g. outcome measures), service metrics (e.g. waiting times) or other types of valuable data (e.g. referral data).
• Manage risk across pathways: ensure that procedures are in place to manage risk when students transition between services. Ensure staff are adequately supported to manage risk.
• Measure outcomes of interventions: use relevant and consistent measures on a regular basis, to monitor outcomes for all students and determine what works for whom
• Evaluate services and partnerships: create a robust service evaluation strategy that makes use of relevant data to improve services, inform decisions, and critically appraise practice