Editorial

Welcome to A Life in the Day, and a warm hello from the TriNova team who have just taken up the editorial reins. We are a small development agency working in the mental health field since the late 80s, and all three of us have a longstanding personal commitment to social inclusion issues.

We are very happy to pick up the red pen and, with the help of a very knowledgeable editorial board, we hope to maintain the extremely high standards and forward-thinking flavour set by Peter Bates. We're sure we'd all like to thank Peter for his sterling efforts over the last two years, and we hope that he will continue to contribute his polemical and stimulating pieces over the coming years. We hope that you, the readers, will do the same.

After many years of promoting the concept of social inclusion in this journal, it was heartening to see publication last summer of the Social Exclusion Unit's report on mental health and social exclusion. The focus of A Life in the Day has always been on ways to turn the concept of social inclusion into a reality. The challenge for all of us now is to take the 27-point action plan in the report back to our own organisations and find ways to make it happen in our localities. PCTs and social services have lead responsibilities for developing local action plans, but we all have a responsibility to see that these plans are ambitious, and are actually implemented.

One of the key roles A Life in the Day can play is to highlight how actions recommended in the SEU report can be implemented in practice, and to share this good practice more widely. We will continue to commission articles that promote the modernisation of day services, and to showcase creative and innovative approaches to developing better 'life opportunities'. We would welcome your views on the SEU report. What changes on the ground are you seeing in your locality? What good practice is there out there that others should know about? Please use the journal to let others know.

The focus for developing better day opportunities (as opposed to day care and treatment) is now about using a person-centred planning approach to identify and meet need. The service user is at the centre of this planning process - not the provider agencies around them. However, letting the user define and choose where, when and what services s/he needs remains a challenge. It can often mean a shift of power from providers and commissioners to the user. If the current debate about patient choice is to be at all meaningful to users, we need to see this power shift. Sara Stanton's article in this issue touches on this key point, and she has set us all a challenge.

In addition, the concept of care pathways is now being used to re-design services. Services should be available to meet need at any point along a user's care pathway, and should not be limited in scope by the boundaries that constrain local agencies. We would like to see this concept taken a step further. Should we not be talking about Opportunity pathways', rather than care pathways? This is more than just a change in language. It would help to change mindsets in those who plan, commission and deliver day opportunities for people with mental health problems.

Just imagine what could happen if these three powerful ideas - person-centred planning, opportunity pathways and real choice - were put into practice. It would go a long way towards making social inclusion a reality.

Adam Pozner, Judith Hammond and Mee Ling Ng

Copyright Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd. Feb 2005
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