Community of practice
The New Models Community of Practice (CoP) sits within the London Mental Health Transformation programme of TPHC. The CoP was established in October 2020 to bring together London’s mental health leaders across different sectors and organisations including mental health providers, commissioners, ICS transformation leads, voluntary care sector and people with lived experience.
Our ‘Community of Practice’ is a collaborative pan-London forum that meets quarterly to explore, share expertise and when possible, find solutions within relevant areas of community mental health transformation as decided by the CoP membership. We aim to ensure that lessons learned, and good practice is maximised across London to support ICS/ICBs as they work through the transformation of their community mental health services.
As part of the CoP, we also established a ‘Critical Friend Group’ of people with lived experience in August 2022 including service users and carers to check and challenge our work. Members of this group have actively been involved and contributed to the development of our CoP resources to date.
All CoP meetings in 2022 focused on the Care Programme Approach transformation and in consultation with our CoP members, it was agreed that the focus of our quarterly meetings in 2023 will be around addressing health inequalities in community mental health transformation.
Resources
Working with the CoP membership, TPHC aims to develop a suite of resources and support materials based on each of the focus topics to support the transformation of community mental health services. Please click on the link below to view these:
Care Programme Approach Transformation
The Community Mental Health Framework for Adults and Older Adults replaced the Care Programme Approach (CPA) for community mental health services. It enables services to shift away from an inequitable, rigid, and arbitrary CPA classification and bring up the standard of care towards a minimum universal standard of high-quality care for everyone in need of community mental healthcare.
The New Models of Community Mental Health programme developed a good practice document in November 2022 to support the CPA Transformation work, in line with the NHSE CPA Position Statement, which was developed to support systems to begin moving away from the CPA in line with the five principles and embed personalised care and support planning for everyone receiving community mental health services.
As local approaches evolve and implementation accelerates, the aim of this document is to share good practice examples and practical ways of approaching the principles of the CPA transformation as shared by a number of mental health trusts in London and across the country. The document also includes a collation of resources from different services and initiatives to promote learning between mental health providers.

Document development
- We used the outputs from the February and June 2022 CoP meetings across the five principles including older adults.
- We engaged with a group of experts by lived experience including service users and carers to understand their views on each of the five principles (including an additional principle around older adults), and their feedback, experiences and feelings were incorporated.
- We engaged with a number of mental health trusts in London and across the country who shared good practice examples or practical ways of approaching the different principles of the CPA transformation.
- We reviewed and included content from existing resources that support the CPA transformation processes.
This document was developed in collaboration with a group of experts by lived experience including service users and carers, mental health trusts in London and across the country, ICS/ICB colleagues and voluntary care sector partners.