Welcome to the month of May’s update of the Lewisham Mental Health Carer forum. This is one of the 5 carer groups I run once a month to give carers a chance to find out what is happening to health, mental health and local authority services aimed at carers.
For this month we were joined by South London and Maudsley’s Associate Medical Director Dr Zain Sadiq who is also a psychiatrist. We were also joined by Lewisam’s Wellbeing Map coordinator Tim Bradley. At the forum we had a number of carers as well as carer champions, the modern matron from SLaM’s Ladywell inpatient wards. We also had in attendance the SLaM involvement lead for Lewisham and Croydon as well as Carers Lewisham staff and a representative from POhWER mental health advocacy.
I explained the reasons for the forum being the following.
1. It can be difficult for Carers in Lewisham have an idea on MH services and influencing them.
2. MH carers need some empowerment in their role.
3. Services have suffered from cuts, carers need to act in order to support everyone.
4. There needs to be an engagement platform for carers to discuss issues.
Welcome to the April update of the Lewisham Mental Health carers forum. This is one of the several forums that I run in the community aimed at carers who look after someone with a mental illness. The forum is not a support group since it focuses on carers engaging with health and social care services. I feel there is a lack of carer led forums where carers can come together and seek engagement, information, co-production and querying of health services.
A Caring Mind 