Progress for £12m Wirral mental health hub

Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust wants to build a centralised urgent response centre at Birkenhead’s Arrowe Park Hospital.

Wirral councillors agreed to move forward with the proposals at a board meeting on 17 October.

A strategic outline case describes the urgent response centre as a “centralised point within Wirral footprint for all urgent mental health work requests.”

The mental health hub would incorporate several urgent care units in the local NHS trust, including the first response service and children and young people teams, to provide a critical response.

In this way, the centre would allow the need and demand for urgent mental health care to be distributed across different services in a coordinated way, using the different skills across the different teams.

It is hoped that the new-build facility would reduce the pressure on the emergency department by delivering care to individuals in mental health crisis that do not require A&E attendance.

Funding has not yet been identified for the £12m scheme.