Northumberland Tyne and Wear Foundation Trust - who we are, what are our current issues and what do we want to achieve? Presentation from the Winterbourne Medicines Programme Launch held in London on 10 September 2014 Ensuring safe, appropriate and optimised use of medication for people with learning disabilities who demonstrate behaviour that can challenge One of the project sites that will be working in partnership with NHS Improving Quality to work on the Winterbourne Medicines Programme

1. Northumberland Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust
• One of the largest Learning Disability and
Mental Health Trusts in the country
• Has a number of locality community LD
teams
• Multi-disciplinary
• Co-located teams
• Good stakeholder engagement with
neighbouring Trusts, CCGs, Social care and
Voluntary Sector
• Good service user and carer engagement
• Good research links
Project team: Dr D Patil, Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr D Conway, Consultant
Clinical Psychologist, C Thomas, Lead Pharmacist, K Bell, Nurse Behaviour
Therapist, Dr G Boynton, Speciality Doctor, Gail Kay, Directorate Manager, Tim
Docking, Group Director, Tony Quinn, Service Manager

2. What are the issues?
 High rates of prescribing psychotropic medication for people
with LD and behaviours that challenge
 No standardised pathway for prescribing
anti-psychotics, mood stabilisers, anti-depressants and
benzodiazepines for LD and behaviours that challenge
 No standardised guidance for the integration of
pharmacological and non pharmacological approaches
 Mixed views and experience of medication use by service
users and carers
At least it feels like somebody is doing something
Can you not just give him something?
I got my son back

3. What we want to do
To gather baseline data on number of adults with CB
on anti-psychotics, mood stabilisers anti-depressants
and benzodiazepines
Development of standardised pathway for
prescribing
Integration with and development of non
pharmacological pathways (e.g. Positive Behaviour
Support pathway for CB)
Develop way of measuring clinical outcomes and
audit pathway