Welcome to the July update of the MH carers forum.
The forum Encourages carers of those with mental health needs to get more engagement from services and to understand how mental health services work. Carers can also query them and compliment what they feel are going well. In attendance were Southwark Carers trustee, Lambeth carers hub mental health carer support. A few carers especially involved ones. The carer inpatient lead for Southwark and also the Carer lead and head of occupational service lead for Lambeth. The forum was also joined by staff and a governor from Guys and St Thomas to speak a bit about their mental health and carer’s strategy. We also had a young person demonstrate a new online application called “kooth”, aimed at young people.
Lee Roach from Lambeth Lambeth Hospital spoke about updates from Lambeth Hospital. He mentioned to the forum about staff who are carer champions over at the hospital. Staff work in a team effort, but not all of them are occupational therapist by background. Lee mentioned the different roles some of the staff do as some of them are running carers groups, some of them were maintaining carrier information boards.
Some events are being planned over at Lambeth hospital for carers. A recent event had a Junior psychiatrist, and occupational therapist and pharmacist talk to carers about questions that they had about medication and about diagnosis for their loved ones. Previously Lee wanted to establish a Carer champion in each of those six teams that were working out of the the Lambeth area. They made a little bit of progress and two or three members of staff were identified as carer champions with others who were keen to be involved.
They even had a carer champion at community level, but unfortunately COVID-19 hit and services had to be put in lock down and what took place then was that the teams were reorganized and merged to cover services. Service leads were expecting a significant reduction in staff availability. So at the moment they are working to operational crisis levels.
Lee continued to state that for the 21st of August they plan to organize a meeting for carer champions. So they will get members of staff together alongside carers and aim to invite involvement from carers to update them on regarding the COVID period. The event will also share good practice and also to advise the new carer champions about what the expectations are for them.
The Lambeth hospital carer and services lead spoke how important that they make sure that the clinicians are thinking about carers and also to make sure that they are aware of all those people that are involved in that person’s life as much as possible.
It is also important that staff record carer’s details on SLaM’s patient record system so that should anything happen to the patient then the clinicians able to stay in contact with carers. Lee mentioned it is important carers are offered engagement and support plans for their needs, not just the need to services and talk about what some of the needs they might have.
Lee excitedly mentioned the that they are developing some exercise classes for carers. These exercise groups are being organized so that information can get to the clinicians and the carers in Lambeth as quickly as possible. On the 7th of September they are going to organize some events for the community mental health teams in Lambeth to raise the profile of carers and the needs of carers and I’m looking for volunteers and people who are on the involvement register. Lee felt the most effective way of communicating with clinicians about the needs of carers and the importance of involving carers, in the care of their loved ones, is for carers to tell their story and to hear that narrative of the carer’s experience.
The update impressed the chair of Southwark carers who was interested to know more about carer champions. I also raised the idea if Lambeth are looking to employ a Lambeth carers inpatient lead as for what Southwark have. I also wanted to know more about the role of Anna Penn-Carruthers who is a centre lead at Streatham living well centre, she was unable to attend the forum, but will come at a future date. I also wanted to know the situation with COVID-19 affecting Lambeth services.
For some time no carer is allowed on the Lambeth hospital site and that was the same for the Maudsley site as well. So no physical visits allowed. That’s now changed and carers are able to visit. But it needs to be by appointment now they have got rooms allocated on the Lambeth hospital site for the carer’s visits to take place. The thing is COVID-19 has made things much more restrictive. Lee feels the challenges for everyone over this period has been utilizing virtual meeting spaces and in how they are using the software mircrosoft teams. Things are moving back more to where they were before, but they are still very limited in terms of how staff visit people’s homes, organizing meetings and limiting the amount of unnecessary contact.
Kooth application
Next up for the Joint Southwark and Lambeth carer forum was Chanelle from XenZone to speak about Kooth which is an online mental wellbeing community. Kooth gives young people access to a community of peers and a team of experienced counsellors. Kooth is accessible for any young person who lives works or studies in Lambeth from the age of 10 to 26 years old.
The good thing about Kooth is that it is free mental health support, but obviously not a replacement for the NHS or any mental health services. Kooth also has a link of different services that young people can contact when they’re in a crisis, which would be national services, because Kooth is not a crisis service is also something that people can use alongside with those those resources.
Shanelle showed us a quick video about Kooth, which can be seen from below.
After the video Shanelle explained what it’s like to sign up to kooth via a demonstration. She mentioned that when you sign up to kooth that it is very simple. So as shown in the video, it is an anonymous service. So they don’t ask people for their names or their address or anything that identifies them. Kooth only asks for basic demographic data that’s taken such as their gender, their ethnicity and age. And the reason they ask for their age is that they can make the content appropriate to the age of that young person.
Kooth has many different links where one of them allows a young person to look into the different counselors, as they can see different biographies about them about whatever they’ve chosen to speak about. Kooth is available in the boroughs of Lambeth, Greenwich, Bromely, Bexley and Southwark for the ages of 10 to 25.
Staff from both South London & Maudsley and Guys & St Thomas were interested to developing links to Kooth for referring to it as an additional resource.
Guys and St Thomas Carers Strategy
Next up were staff from Guys and St Thomas regarding their carer and mental health strategies. I feel part of the aim of this forum is to allow carers what services, policies and strategies are being done to aid in supporting their role. We were joined by Jackie Waghorn who is their new Mental Health lead for that trust taking over Caroline Sweeney. We were also joined by Sarah Allen who is the Head of Patient Experience at Guys and St Thomas talking about their carer’s strategy.
Guys and St Thomas also sent Nikki who is one of the dementia, clinical nurse specialist on dementia and delirium services and they are inpatient based who their main role is to provide care and support to patients and their carers and staff within the inpatient settings. Nikki spoke about how they support patients by ensuring that staff carry out the principles of the St Johns campaign such as ensuring that flexible working, flexible plans are committed. Other things done are getting out carer surveys out to carers so that they can really understand that they have a voice and staff can understand what carers needs are. The staff normally carry out these carer’s surveys when carers come into the wards to visit their loved ones, and then staff can go through the survey with them. Otherwise, they send out carer surveys via posts and staff collect them.
Next to update the forum was Sarah Allen who is Hear fo Patient experience, she came to talk about the NHS trusts carer’s strategy and carer’s policies that are under review. There are 3 priorities so far which the trust will be looking to review.
1. Providing carer’s network days which are for local residents in Lambeth and Southwark, plus GSTT staff who may also be carers. The aim of these network days is to develop carer’s skills further in sort of key areas is what’s known as key skill stations. So sort of little mini sessions on different aspects of caring for someone. So that ranges from things like providing personal care and mouth care, to things like on dementia and delirium.
2. The other priority is they have a carer’s passport at the trust, but it’s not quite as well embedded as they would like. But really the role of that document is to support staff in understanding and recognizing the role of carers and the part they have to play in terms of the care and sort of providing information and understanding on the condition needs and preferences of the patient.
3. The final priority really is around for GSTT staff. This being that some of their staff are carers and is pretty much recognizing that their own staff do you have caring responsibilities as well often in addition to being parents, for example, that may also have young children that may also have a responsibility. They’re looking after an older parent or somebody else within their extended family or Friendship Circle.
The chair of Southwark carers was interested to hear more about Guys & St Thomas’s carers passport. She was also interested in the networking days.
Next we had Jackie Waghorn speak about her role as the the new mental health lead at Thomas’s. Jackie has been in post for six weeks, so is pretty new and still trying to find her feet in the organization.
She has has come from Croydon, where she was doing a very similar role running health services. Prior to that. she worked in offices and mental health trust for many years, managing crisis and mental health services and working in crisis and mental health services.
Guys and St Thomas Mental Health Strategy
Jackie spoke more about GSTT mental health strategy which was launced on Mental Health Day and the strategy lasts up till October 2022. In developing the strategy, this strategy was devised by her predecessor, Caroline Sweeney. And in devising this strategy, she did consult with a number of different stakeholders, including patients and carers. Jackie was not sure what any of the forum members were involved in that.
What the strategy does and in, in supporting carers is not quite specific, becaue it’s basically divided up into three sections which are patients, people and partnerships. And it really is just thinking about how they can involve carers and how they can support carers in each different section. Jackie is looking to basically develop a group which would oversee policies and things to make sure that mental health is considered in everything that GSTT do. Next we heard from Georgie Smith who has recently recruited into a new role which is Mental Health Improvement lead.
Her role is and the work that I’ll be doing is is carrying out several projects under the name of Lilly Sterner, who was a patient who left a legacy. In those projects she will focus around improving mental health awareness and improving mental health delivery within the trust of guys and St Thomas. Then Paula one of the governors from Guys and St Thomas NHS Trust. She was interested to hear if there was enough support within the community for mental health and also onthe strategies that the trust will be administering?
I was interested in how the trust engages with patients and the public and if there were staff at guys who has a focus on carers. Sarah mentioned that they try quite hard to actually involve patients and carers in sort of the redesign of pathways and redesign of services. This is done via the patient and public engagement team. It was also mentioned that there has been a number of staff trained up to become what’s known as mind and body champions, the Mind Body Program from kings health partnerships, has done a lot of training for keep just staff focused mental health awareness. So they have mental health champions and obviously part of mental health is care awareness. It will be good to see if GSTT can work with the joint Lambeth and Southwark MH carers forum as their new Mental Health lead continues her role, as the forum aims to raise the profile of mental health carers.
Southwark inpatient carers lead update
The last update was from David Meyrick who is the Southwark carers lead for inpatient wards. David reported that all the Southwark Wards are open, were wards that were moved to other boroughs are now back in Southwark. There is other good news that the carer champion roles are becoming more relevant and active. SLaM have also just finished a project on one of the Wards listening in action project. This has been a project to make the ward more family friendly. There has also been an improvement to the waiting area the visiting area.
The waiting room has been redesigned search cordoned off to give a bit more privacy and social distancing plus two families can to visit at once rather than a portable partition so it’s a bit more than welcoming and relaxing area and and also a lot of work on the leaflets and literature produced for carers and help make it more informative and more family friendly from that perspective.
We also had an update from carer peer supporter Annette on how she is co-facilitating carer support groups online and how the peer support role empowers her to support families and carers.
A Caring Mind 