This website is supported by an A4 hand-held document, Primary Care Trust Intranet pages, and an educational CD Rom. The website was designed to widen access to viewing these important
guidelines and to assist the process of sharing good practice widely. It will also serve to allow rapid
access to updated versions, when these are developed in the future.

Why Do We Need Primary Care Guidelines
The Mental Health National Service Framework (NSF), Standard 2 states:
“Any service user who contacts their primary health care team with a
common mental health problem should
- have their mental health needs identified and assessed
- be offered effective treatments, including referral to specialist
services for further assessment, treatment and care if they require it”

The Local Strategy
One quarter of routine G.P consultations are for people with a mental health problem and around
90% of mental health care is provided solely by primary care. Two of the most common disorders
seen are anxiety and Depression. The NSF States that “primary care groups should work with
primary care teams and specialist services to agree and implement assessment and management protocols across the primary care group” (for the common conditions).

Salford Primary Care Trust has ensured that this element of the mental health NSF was addressed locally by:
• Establishing a professional working group for mental health primary care, led by a local G.P and
with input form a mixture of primary care, mental health Trust and SPCT professionals This group
has embraced the NSF agenda and developed 7 sets of robust, well presented clinical guidelines
covering the conditions of anxiety, depression, postnatal depression, eating disorders, alcohol
misuse, early psychosis and schizophrenia.
• A guidelines framework was developed, based on AGREE criteria described by Cluzeau et al
(see www.agreecollaboration.org) and applied consistently throughout all seven sets of mental
health guidelines.
• An educational programme was designed to support the implementation of these guidelines in
primary care settings, this includes a launch event and visits to the individual practices to raise
awareness.
• Electronic access developments including availability of these guidelines, patient information and
supplementary information via a web-site and CD ROM.
• Strategy for measuring and monitoring the impact of these guidelines on mental health care in
Salford via such things as monitoring prescribing patterns, retrospective analysis of referrals to
mental health teams, user experience evaluation.

Engaging Service Users & Carers
Users and carers were involved at the appropriate point in the refining of the drafts and the
endorsement Process for all of the mental health guidelines. This was achieved through formally presenting draft documents to the Salford Mental Health Forum initially. This then led to a focus
group session facilitated by 3 members of the guidelines development group (Tom Tasker, Paul Strickland & Tony Marlow). The focus group engaged Salford Forum members and members of a
local carers group, who all volunteered to participate. During the focus group exercise, users and carers shared their experiences of seeking help from services and what level of information was
given to them – this was contrasted with the information included in the documents.

Additionally, Salford Primary Care Trust was delighted to take the opportunity to enhance the presentation of this website, and help promote a local arts project by including some service user art work in the design. Our grateful thanks go to the START in Salford Project and the individual artists,
for allowing us to incorporate their art work. A brief summary about START.

Implementation Details & Acknowledgements

Appendix