We're working with Greater Manchester Police, Northwest Ambulance Service, local authority colleagues and other key partners to transform our 136 suites.
These are hospital-based places of safety where the police can bring someone needing urgent mental health care and assessment
Every possible community-based care option will be considered before bringing someone to a 136 suite. This is vital for people’s recovery, ensuring they have a positive experience and maintaining their dignity and liberty.
For people who do need to be brought to a 136 suite, we want to improve the quality and safety of their care, better meet their needs and those of their carers and family, and ensure more efficient use of resources and professionals’ time and skills.
This work forms part of our ambitious service transformation programme.
We currently provide a 136 suite in each of our five boroughs – Bury, Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale, Oldham, Stockport and Tameside. Each suite is managed and run independently.
To make sure we can provide a high quality service that meets people's needs, we're investing £3.1m in improving and streamlining our 136 services. The following plans are based on reccomendations from an external review, which considered lots of feedback and data.
The changes will be rolled out in a phased approach over the next few months to minimise disruption (see expected timetable below).
Once the improvement programme is complete, we will provide:
- Two 136 suites at Tameside Hospital (current suite will be refurbished and a new suite created)
- One 136 suite at The Royal Oldham Hospital (current suite will be refurbished)
- One 136 suite at Bury’s Fairfield Hospital (current suite will be refurbished)
The benefits of the new planned approach are:
- Improved patient care and experience - patients will be assessed more quickly, in a safer and more comfortable environment.
- Police colleagues will benefit from quicker, safer and more effective handover of patients' care to mental health colleagues.
- Police and ambulance colleagues will have easy access to centralised information about all our 136 suites, ensuring they can take patients to the nearest available suite.
- The good geographic spread of suites means the closest 136 suite isn't too far, ensuring best use of police and ambulance colleagues’ time. Any additional travel time will be more than made up by faster patient handover.
- Mental health colleagues will benefit from opportunities to rotate across different services, helping increase their skills and experience
- Better use of tax payers' money
As with any building work, there’s a small possibility of the timescales below slipping due to unexpected issues.
If we need to make any changes we'll update this page and let our key partners know.
Phase one:
- September 2024 – 136 suites at Bury’s Fairfield Hospital and Tameside Hospital will temporarily close for refurbishment
- December 2024 - 136 suite at Bury’s Fairfield Hospital and two 136 suites at Tameside Hospital will re-open. The suite at Rochdale's Birch Hill will permanantly close.
Phase 2:
- January 2025 – 136 suite at The Royal Oldham Hospital will temporarily closes for refurbishment
- April 2025 - 136 suite at The Royal Oldham Hospital will re-open. Suite at Stockport's Stepping Hill Hospital will permanantly close.
If you have any questions please email jon@se-projects.co.uk or michellecasey@nhs.net