Short abstract
Health tsars: spin or substance?: Eight health directors (“tsars”) were appointed from 1999 to 2002. Katherine Burke asked them to summarise their achievements and other people to assess their work. A ninth “tsar”, Dr Sue Roberts, was appointed in March 2003 to cover diabetes. The full text is accessible at www.bmj.com
My achievements: My first day in post saw the start of the process that led to the NHS Plan, and the crucial task was to make sure that mental health—one of the government's clinical priorities for the next decade—was in it.
The NHS Plan launched a set of new services intended to plug the most conspicuous gaps in the mental health system. It brought in community teams for vulnerable patients who might otherwise drift out of care, early intervention for young people with psychosis, and home treatment.
We followed it with a set of strategies in areas of neglect—such as services for ethnic minorities and for patients with both mental illness and drug misuse.
We set up the National Institute for Mental Health in England to make sure that policy turned into action at local level. We found money to refurbish inpatient wards.
What others say
Richard Brook, chief executive of MIND: Louis is responsive and genuinely committed to ensuring quality mental health services. He has always been interested in understanding service users' concerns. But the political drive for change seems to be ebbing, and it is here that service users especially feel more could and should have been done by the tsar.
Supplementary Material
Figure 1.
Professor Louis Appleby
National director for mental health
Appointed: April 2000
Associated Data
This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.
