Mental health and wellbeing is receiving more attention than ever before in the media and from politicians.

This is in no small part thanks to the work of mental health charities such as Mind and Rethink and their successful Time to Change campaign, encouraging people to talk about their mental health with the aim of eliminating the stigma associated with having a mental health problem.

These conversations are working – recent data from the campaign suggests that public attitudes are changing towards mental health with a significant shift within the last decade.

Through the Five Year Forward View the NHS has also set out how it is driving towards an equal response to mental and physical health with the two being treated together – the parity of esteem agenda.

This is all good news but we have more work to do in London to end life-limiting stigma and to provide effective, quality services that match the needs of the people using them.

More than two million Londoners will experience mental ill health this year and London has the highest demand in the country for mental health services.

This is why we believe that the work done by the Mental Health Strategic Clinical Network in the capital is so important. We are working to ensure that we don’t just have ambitions for mental health but that we’re able to make these ambitions achievable and real.

We co-chair the network and are joined by other clinicians, stakeholders and citizens with different views and different backgrounds in mental health. We come together to share our knowledge, to deliberate strategic clinical issues and we lead a programme of work for London to deliver large and lasting change in a number of different ways.

We’re working on action plans in response to the Crisis Care Concordat. We want to improve access to support before crisis point, we want to improve the quality of help and care in crisis and we want to help prevent future crisis.

There are already some excellent examples of crisis care work happening across the capital – London’s mental health trusts are working together with the police to ensure that people facing a mental health crisis receive the appropriate care. This is taking form in our street triage services, in providing places of safety in our hospitals rather than being detained in police cells and through ensuring that every emergency department in London has 24/7 psychiatry services on site.

We are working to provide more training to improve the quality of care in primary care, where more than 90% of mental health care is delivered. GPs will have access to and knowledge of local, specialist mental health and social care services.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services are already helping many people but we want even more to benefit. So we are looking at ways to improve access for pregnant women, new mums and for people experiencing their first episode of psychosis.

People with serious mental illnesses experience a 15-20 year shortfall in life expectancy. To ensure people with a mental illness are as healthy as possible, we are looking at how to provide good health promotion and long term disease care.

We’re really proud to be supporting a new pan London initiative, the Healthy London Partnerships to take forward a strand of work on mental health and we are providing clinical advice to the new Mental Health Transformation Board. The overall aim is to work together, to improve mental health of the capital.

We have achieved much in recent years but there is more to do and we want to take Londoners with us on the next steps of the journey.

So whether you are a health practitioner seeing a patient – or someone with a relative, friend, neighbour or colleague who has mental health issues – then please offer them your support and understanding.

As a society we need to make mental health problems come out of the shadows so sufferers realise just how much help there is out there for them and how we are all working together to bring about real change.

More information on our work can be found the London Strategic Clinical networks website.

Mental Health Strategic Clinical Leadership Group Co-chairs

Dr Nick Broughton, Medical Director, West London Mental Health NHS Trust

Dr Nick Broughton is medical director of West London Mental Health NHS Trust and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He leads the urgent and crisis care programme of the London mental health strategic clinical network which he co-chairs. Nick was responsible for the London mental health crisis commissioning standards published in October 2014. Nick completed his medical training at Cambridge University and St Thomas’s Hospital. He has worked as a psychiatrist in North West London for over 20 years and now sits on the London Mental Health Transformation Board.

Dr Matthew Patrick, Chief Executive, South London Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

Dr Matthew Patrick is Chief Executive of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He joined the Trust in October 2013.

Matthew trained as an adult psychiatrist at the Maudsley and Bethlem Royal Hospitals and for many years combined clinical work and developmental research.

Over the past four years he has contributed to national mental health policy and strategy, including the development of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme; the development of the New Horizons mental health policy; and the government’s Mental Health Strategy, No Health Without Mental Health.

More recently he has led on work around the development of e-mental health and has been actively involved in the development of mental health within Academic Health Science Centres.