£20m mental health facility opens for young people in West Yorkshire
Red Kite View in Leeds has been designed with input from clinicians and young people with lived experience of mental health services.
A new £20m mental health facility will open for young people in West Yorkshire this Thursday (13th January).
Red Kite View is based in Armley, Leeds, and has been designed with input from clinicians and young people with lived experience of mental health services.
An aim of the service is to reduce the need for 13 – 18-year-olds to travel outside their local area for specialist mental health inpatient care.
Being closer to home means they can stay closer to their families, friends and schools.
The scale of the facility, is the first of it's kind in West Yorkshire.
The 22-bed unit replaces the 8-bed unit at Little Woodhouse Hall (also in Leeds) increasing the regional bed capacity by 14.
The two main wards will have 100 members of staff, made up of nurses, psychiatrists, , clinical psychologists, teachers and a wide range of allied health professionals and non-clinical support staff.
This team is three times the size of the previous one at Little Woodhouse Hall.
They will work closely with the young person’s community mental health team during their stay, ensuring they can return to their families and local communities as soon as possible.
Dawn Hanwell, Deputy Chief Executive at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LYPFT) which runs Red Kite View, said:
“It has been my absolute privilege to lead this project and finally see it come to fruition after five years of hard work from a huge range of people.
“This fantastic new facility is something we in the NHS and our children, their parents and carers have so desperately wanted for so long. Our enhanced expert team will be providing fantastic quality care closer to home, and I sincerely hope that once it’s fully operational, it will ultimately see the end of young people going out-of-area for care.”
Tim Richardson, Head of Operations for Children and Young People’s Service at LYPFT, said:
“Our role is to support young people experiencing significant psychiatric, psychological or emotional problems that are causing them interpersonal, educational and social functioning problems. The team will work with a huge range of other services across West Yorkshire supporting young people’s mental health including the NHS, local authorities and third sector providers.
“We spent a lot of time listening to young people with lived experience of mental health services to influence the environment and the way we deliver care. Our young people told us they wanted Red Kite View to feel like a home-from-home, or even like a hotel, and not clinical like a hospital. They also told us nature was important in terms of wellbeing and recovery. So we designed it to feel just like that, trying to ‘bring the outside in’ where we could through space, natural light and some quite incredible artwork.”