Service user experience in adult mental health: improving the experience of care for people using adult NHS mental health services

Reasons for the decision

There has been new legislation including an amendment to the Mental Health Act, and a number of reports reviewing mental health services, highlighting that people's experience of mental health care still remains poor. Overall, NICE's guideline recommendations are relevant to current practice and are not in conflict with new evidence.

Stakeholders were consulted on the decision not to update. Following consultation, several stakeholders indicated that COVID-19 has greatly impacted mental health services (see views of stakeholders).

Topic experts and patient representative groups raised a number of overarching issues around mental health services, including changes to Mental Health Act legislation and highlighting that mental health services are still struggling to meet even basic demands.

The Final report of the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983 sets out recommendations for government on how the Mental Health Act and associated practice needs to change. The NICE guideline currently links directly to the landing page of the most recent update to the Mental Health Act. The current legislation does not conflict with the NICE guideline. However, should the Mental Health Act change in line with these recommendations then the NICE guideline may need to be revised. This will be revisited in due course once any changes to legislation have been passed.

Furthermore, the NHS Long Term Plan and NHS Mental Health Implementation Plan made a renewed commitment that mental health services will grow faster than the overall NHS budget with a ringfenced investment for mental health services by 2023/24. This implementation plan aims to ensure that the NHS provides high quality, evidence-based mental health services.

For further details and a summary of all evidence identified in surveillance, see appendix A.