Health and social work services

Tender description

The London borough of Camden is seeking to procure the Adult Mental Health Peer Mentoring and Cultural Advocacy service to support Camden residents with mental health. The service is divided into 2 Lots: Lot 1 — Peer Mentoring; Lot 2 — Cultural Advocacy. Tenderers can bid for 1 or both Lots. The service will provide one-to-one peer lead interventions to support people to identify the areas of need and outcomes they would like to meet to improve their physical and mental wellbeing. Whilst engaging with BME communities that experience poorer mental health outcomes. Forming part of Camden's emerging Resilience Network. Peer Mentoring will deliver time limited 1 to 1 peer mentoring interventions by people with mental health challenges (mentors) to people at an early stage of their mental health recovery journey (mentees). The service will develop a training programme to support mentors in their role and to facilitate their return to employment. It will also help mentees to explore their areas of interest and progress into a mentoring role if desired. The service, supported by appropriate training, will build on people's strengths and skills and help to create pathways out of peer mentoring and into opportunities in employment, volunteering and education. The service will have a key role engaging with people from BME communities and facilitate access to early help. The service aims to support a minimum of 230 referrals including 180 mentees and 50 mentors a year. Cultural Advocacy will have 2 key aims: enable better access to preventative offers and support recovery for people who use crisis and inpatient services. Both interventions will be aimed at specific BME communities and in particular those who are currently underrepresented in preventative offers and overrepresented in crisis services. The community element will take a key role in developing awareness around mental health and community leadership to engage with BME communities. This strand will use ground up community development approaches with communities to identify issues and co-produce interventions that impact on their wellbeing. The second strand will support new and repeated users of inpatient and crisis services where culturally specific interventions are viewed to be beneficial for their recovery. This element will work closely with health staff to identify patients from BME communities and design effective approaches. The focus will be chiefly on black communities where the use of inpatient and crisis services remains at a significantly high level. The maximum budget for this service is 200 000 GBP per annum.