What are adult locality services?

[123wombles]

Today I was assessed for CBT and the assessor decided I needed to be seen by adult locality services rather than the CBT team. I’ve no idea what that is or the difference? Does anyone know more about this?
I’ve had a very traumatic couple of years so
imagine they felt I wasn’t appropriate for CBT. But I’d like to understand what the locality service is and what the process is. Thanks in advance!

Do they mean your community mental health team?

Thanks for the reply. They defined it as the adult locality service which could be a new name for that but I’m not sure!

To me this is NHS jargon but breaking it down it means the team that work with adults (usually 17.5 to 65 years old) in whatever geographical location they cover.

It could well be the community mental health team.

I work in the NHS and I don't know why they can't use plain English.

That's the euphemism they use for the community mental health team in the area served by CPFT (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust).

People keep trying to rename this shit and it annoys me because it reflects prejudice. They wouldn't rename gastroenterology or oncology to the mysterious "Locality Team/Service", with no indication of what kind of problem they actually deal with (though they might rename some services with a plain English description like "Eye Clinic"). But with mental illness they feel the need to hide what the service does.

Where I live at the moment, CMHTs have been relabelled "Community Mental Health Recovery Services", which is less bad, but it's still a difference with how other medical services are named (you don't get referred to a "Community Eye Health Recovery Service" or a "Liver Health Recovery Service"), and it's still pushing an ideology of wanting to get you out of services as soon and as cheaply as possible while pretending to be aligned with the survivor-led recovery movement.

We'll never have parity while the NHS itself so clearly distinguishes between physical health (call it what it is, either with medical terminology or plain English terminology) and mental health (deploy circumlocutions and obfuscations to confuse people and excuse poor service) in its terminology.

Also it's just plain unhelpful to patients to use terminology that hides what services do. I was told once I was going to be seen by the PRISM nurse, only I had never come across the term PRISM in healthcare and heard "prison nurse" instead, which is… less than ideal when you're struggling mentally. Turns out it was a primary care mental health service 🙄

Thanks all! That makes more sense now!

Anyway, whatever they turn out to be, good luck with the locality service wombles. I hope they can offer you some appropriate help.

Thanks clumping...I hadn’t noticed your PRISM experience comment before! How do they come up with such complex terms that mean nothing to patients?!

In terms of the process, it depends on the area and on your circumstances, but if it's a CMHT, based on my experiences in a few different parts of the country and what I've heard from other people, I'd guess you're likely to have your paperwork looked at, and your referral might be accepted or declined at that point, and if declined, possibly with some recommendations about what other services you can access.

If the referral is accepted you'll probably see a mental health nurse, mental health social worker or someone in a similar role for an initial assessment. What happens after that is based on what they think you need — you can be signposted to other services or discharged to the GP, referred on to different mental health services if more appropriate, or they might offer appointments with a nurse to check in, psychiatrist treatment, psychology sessions, or other stuff.

Hopefully someone with professional experience in this area will be able to give you a better idea of what to expect.

Haha I know, PRISM was the worst one I've had yet! I was a bit paranoid at the time and kept telling the guy "but I haven't done anything wrong, why do I need to see a prison nurse?" and he, thinking I was saying PRISM and confused by the reference to wrongdoing, was trying to reassure me that nobody thought I'd done anything wrong, they just thought the prison/PRISM nurse was the most appropriate person for me to see 🤣