The Improving Care in Self-Harm Health Integration Team (STITCH HIT) have had some spectacular successes over the last few years. The team have been working hard to make improvements to take self-harm care towards parity of esteem with physical illness, including developing the excellent care and treatment self-harm patients deserve.

Salena Williams, co-Director of STITCH, presented some impressive figures at the lunchtime seminar on our mental health HITs run by the Avon Primary Care Research Collaborative in January.

So far the team have:

• Reduced the mean cost of care per patient
• Significantly reduced self discharges from 20 per cent to 13 per cent
• Reduced waiting time between being seen by a medic to being seen by a psychiatric liaison nurse by two and a half hours
• Significantly increased psychosocial assessments from 57 per cent to 68 per cent
• Reduced the length of stay by more than half a day, from 3.06 to 2.09 days
• Reduced intensive therapy unit (ITU) admission from 2.5 per cent to 0.5 per cent
• Reduced total admissions from 4.1 to 2.8
• Reduced cost of attendance by 15 per cent per patient, from £1,178 to £1,001
• Repeat self-harm reduced by 27 per cent

The chart above shows the drop in waiting times following STITCH's expansion of the psychiatric liaison service at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in 2014.