{"id":229127,"date":"2025-10-21T10:33:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T10:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/229127\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T10:33:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T10:33:07","slug":"southampton-city-council-told-to-cut-mental-health-assessment-delays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/229127\/","title":{"rendered":"Southampton City Council told to cut mental health assessment delays"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It also paid \u00a3500 for the distress, frustration and uncertainty caused.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">DoLS are used to ensure vulnerable adults are protected when they lack the mental capacity to consent to their care or treatment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Southampton City Council&#8217;s health overview and scrutiny panel heard that as well as an 18-month delay in carrying out a mental capacity assessment, there was also no record of a visit that the local authority said it had completed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Both matters were considered by the ombudsman to be faults by the council.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Presenting the council&#8217;s action plan to the scrutiny panel, Hannah Balzaretti, head of whole life pathway, said in June there had been 404 DoLS applications on the waiting list.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">She said this had fallen to 188 new referrals and 113 renewals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Those numbers are coming down and that&#8217;s because we have increased the number of staff that are trained to do the best interests in the DoLS applications.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We have increased the number of service managers and team managers that can do the authorisation of those DoLS and through our data we have greater oversight of the throughput,&#8221;she added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The action plan will be brought back before councillors in six months to assess the progress made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It also paid \u00a3500 for the distress, frustration and uncertainty caused. DoLS are used to ensure vulnerable adults&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-229127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}