Welcome to the June update of the Lewisham mental health carers forum. A forum aimed at unpaid carers supporting someone close who has a mental illness. This is one of the 4 carer groups that I run per month. In attendance were our usual carer members along with representatives from Lewisham Healthwatch. The speakers from South London & Maudsley NHS trust being psychiatric Liaison staff and the lead from SLaM Patient Advice Liaison service. We were also joined by SLaMs involvement lead for Lewisham and Croydon, plus we were also joined by the Mental Health Lead of Lewisham and Greenwich Hospital trust.
Tag Archives: carers
Making that difference
Welcome to a blog site of former carer Matthew McKenzie from South London. I used to care for my mother who passed away this year. For close to 18 years I have been supporting her and my brothers who both have autism, but for my mother she had a difficult time with mental health. There was only so much I could do and a lot of support depended on health and social care services that were already struggling.
Lewisham BAME MH Carer Forum May 2020
Welcome to the May update of my Lewisham BAME mental health carers forum. This is one of my 5 carer groups that focuses on the experiences of BAME carers and sometimes BAME groups suffering mental ill health. I usually run this forum from the Lewisham Branch of Bromley, Lewisham & Greenwich MIND. Due to CoronaVirus I have moved the forum online via ZOOM.
As a reminder the forum is not a support group, but a way to connect to health providers in the community. The forums focus is of course on mental health services so our local mental health trust (South London and Maudsley) engages with BAME families and carers at the forum.
Beyond Carers Week 2020
Hello everyone and fellow carers. Just a quick blog post now that Carers Week has ended. For those who do not know about Carers Week, basically it is an awareness event that looks to raise the awareness of unpaid carers throughout the week of June 8th – 14th.
Carers Week is an annual awareness campaign to celebrate and recognise the vital contribution made by the UK’s 6.5 million carers.
My view on how Carers Week 2020 went
I am not sure if many people or blogs mention views on post events. I felt Carers Week 2020 really raised the bar for Carers week 2021 due to the amount of activities, events and awareness drives from people, charities and organisations. I have been involved in quite a few carer awareness events over that week.
Southwark MH Carers forum May 2020
Here is May’s update of the Southwark mental health carers forum. This is one of the 4 to 5 carer groups I run each month. All carer forums and support groups are run online via Zoom due to social distancing because of COVID-19. I feel families and carers still need to know what is happening with services especially when health and social care is under strain.
In attendance for the forum we had carers from Southwark and also from Lambeth since the Lambeth carers forum is not running at the moment. We were also joined by trustees of Southwark Carers, plus Southwark Healthwatch were in attendance. We were also joined by Maudsley’s NHS Southwark inpatient carer lead, plus a carer who co-runs their carer groups. The main presentation was from Bernadette Pickerell who is SLaM’s Mental Health Act Team Leader and Senior MHA Co-ordinator.
Lewisham MH Carers forum May 2020
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.
LSE research on Carer wellbeing
Research at the London School of Economics and Political Science want to understand what impact covid19 coronavirus has on mentalhealth, wellbeing and loneliness of carers supporting people with poor mentalhealth. If you are an unpaid carer help LSE by filling in their brief
https://lse.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3ItyiAwSrT7xeTj
The survey should take about 15 minutes. All information will be treated in confidence. You can change answers until you submit the questionnaire. It has received ethical clearance from the London School of Economics and Political Science. If you have questions please contact David McDaid Email: d.mcdaid@lse.ac.uk More information at http://eufami.org/2020/04/28/covid-19/
Resilience of Carers during Covid Research
Are you an unpaid caregiver for someone with #MultipleSclerosis, #dementia, #cancer or #mentalhealth condition?
Researchers at Kings College London are recruiting UK participants aged 18+ for a 35 – 40 min online survey to better understand resilience and distress during COVID-19 pandemic.
Southwark MH Carers forum February 2020
Welcome to a quick update from the Southwark Mental Health carers forum. I know I have not been blogging for around a month, but I have recently suffered a bereavement. It has taken a fair bit of energy to do much, but I am quite proud to be able to continue to run the forums even though I have to take time and look after myself.
Given the time I will eventually write more about the current situation, but for now I want to at least update carer members. On the February update of the MH carers forum for Southwark, we are able to get support and engaged with King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Guys and St Thomas NHS Trust and South London & Maudsley. For February King’s college hospital Mental Health Lead kindly attended the forum to speak to carers about Kings Mental Health strategy, which is still going through development.
Caring through the CoronaVirus
Thanks for dropping by my carers blog post. This site raises awareness of unpaid carers and mental health. As of this blog post I am caring for someone close and just coping the best I can, while keeping a close eye on events. As of the title, this blog post is about the Corona virus and its implication to carers like myself and those in the community.
If you have been following my tweets on twitter, I have been posting that carers need to take care of themselves. Sometimes I have done a blog post about carer wellbeing and sometimes I will do a video blog or podcast.
A Caring Mind 