A CUMBRIAN MP has urged a health minister to intervene over what has been described as south Cumbria’s “failing” mental health trust.

MP Tim Farron met with Jackie Doyle-Price yesterday to ask her to urgently intervene over the area's mental health services as, he said, they fall short of targets.

This follows last month's decision by Cumbria Partnership Trust, which provides mental health services in the area, to stall on plans to transfer the services to Lancashire Care Trust, which was rated as ‘requires improvement’ in a CQC report.

Meanwhile, mental health services in North Cumbria are set to be moved to Northumberland, Tyne & Wear Foundation Trust, which has been rated as ‘outstanding.’

Mr Farron said he had repeatedly raised concerns over Cumbria Partnership Trust’s ability to deliver mental health services after a CQC reported them as ‘inadequate’ when it came to ‘responsiveness’ to youth mental health services and recent figures showed they were missing targets when it came to eating disorder services.

"The Partnership Trust are trying to offload responsibility of our mental health services onto another failing trust," he said. "Poor management and leadership decisions have left us into a situation where vital mental health services are now failing in many cases and there’s nobody at the top actually making any changes to make things better.

“There are wonderful people working in our local mental health services, but the service is under-resourced and not well led – South Cumbria is just an afterthought for health bosses.

“That’s why I’ll be asking the minister to intervene so that people of all ages with mental health conditions can get the treatment and the service that they need and deserve.”

Stephen Eames, chief executive of Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said: “The future of mental health services for patients living in Cumbria, north and south, is our top priority.

“We have recognised that we can only improve services by working with large providers in the north east and Lancashire and we are currently undertaking a complex process to ensure that we get the best outcome for our patients and staff.

“Our board of directors have already agreed that in principle, that transferring services in north Cumbria to Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Foundation Trust (NTW) would provide the best outcome for patients in the long term to improve the quality of services. A full business case is now being prepared with a view to transferring services to NTW in October 2019.

“We have delayed judgement on progressing to a full business case in south Cumbria pending the outcome of quality assurance work being undertaken in South Cumbria. We will be considering this further at the end of the month.”