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From September 2024, we started to receive more feedback on people’s experiences of mental health crisis support. This emerged from what people told us through Mental Health Voice, Healthwatch Kent and Healthwatch Medway without any targeted prompts for mental health crisis. To understand what people were telling us, we identified and analysed 489 related experiences from January 2024 to February 2025.
We found:
People told us about understanding, supportive and helpful care from professionals and how positive interactions had enabled them to manage their mental health, keep them safe and help them to recover.
We heard the most positive feedback about voluntary, community and social enterprise services and Kent and Medway Safe Havens.
Other key service types were community mental health teams, general practice, home treatment and rapid response, the Kent and Medway Mental Health Crisis Line, emergency departments, children and young people’s mental health services, talking therapies, liaison psychiatry, and mental health hospitals.
Key issues were waiting times for crisis support, ineffective responses and unsuccessful coordination or continuity of care between services.
We heard the most about crisis support for people aged 16 to 25, 35 to 44, and 55 to 64.
“I have been admitted and detained under section [at a mental health] hospital. … The staff were amazing, kind, caring, and professional.”
In December 2024 and February 2025, we presented initial summary reports to key stakeholders in the Kent and Medway mental health system on what people had told us about mental health crisis support. As a result, improvements were made to public awareness of, access to and coordination of crisis services. In June 2025, we shared this report with the mental health team at NHS Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board, with recommendations based on people’s feedback and suggestions. They are now working with mental health care providers to improve people’s experiences of crisis support.
“There needs to be room to deviate from a script in order to fully understand a person.”
We make further recommendations throughout this full report for key services and the wider integrated care system. These align with the draft Kent and Medway suicide and self-harm prevention strategy for 2026 to 2030 in terms of the priorities of supporting efforts to improve support for those in crisis and maximising our collective impact.
In October 2025, we shared this report with the Kent and Medway suicide prevention programme team, senior and operational leaders within Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust, Public Health, and safe havens, with a call to action for further positive change. We are also sharing this report with key members of adult social care in Kent and Medway, all four health and care partnership leaders, and general practice leadership.
Full responses from services and the wider system to our report and recommendations are included in the report. Examples of actions taken so far include:
To support our recommendation on preventative support for people in or at risk of mental health crisis, NHS Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board is expanding the safe haven model to a third operating 24/7, with all 11 interoperable, ensuring a 24/7 community crisis alternative, and is also expanding community crisis recovery beds.
In line with our recommendations, Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust are making improvements to waiting times and crisis support, coordination and continuity of care, fostering a culture of compassionate care, bridging service gaps and inequalities and improving crisis line performance and integrated care.
