Guide: Prioritising mental health funding to urgent and emergency care in the East of England

This guide has been developed in partnership between Health Innovation East, NHS England and NHS Improvement and RAND Europe. It has been prepared in discussion with Integrated Care Systems/Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (ICS/STPs) in the East of England to help them and other ICS/STPs with determining spending and planning priorities and evaluating projects within mental health urgent and emergency care.

The first section of the guide highlights the key points to remember when approaching the prioritisation process and the evaluation of what is prioritised. There is a checklist to help systems in this process. We also provide a list of resources that systems may find useful. Subsequent chapters explain the key points in more detail. Supporting information is given in boxes alongside the text and, where greater detail may be
helpful, in Annexes at the end of the guide.

You can also refer to the accompanying practical toolkit version (downloadable as a word document here). This toolkit brings together key practical resources from the guide and has been developed as a practical workbook to help develop logic models whilst determining spending planning priorities within mental health urgent and emergency care.

This guide should not be construed as a comprehensive review of, nor the final word on, possible approaches to prioritisation. It is a distillation of the knowledge and experience of the authors, strengthened and refined by discussions with ICS/STPs in the East of England.