Caring for Yourself is a self-help workbook in eight parts. The resource is available online and is free to download.
To download the guide please click on the links below
Caring for Yourself
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News
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We hope that you and your family are well and keeping safe.
We ask that you please follow the government guidelines to avoid going out of your home unless for essential items, food and/or medication or to work if you are unable to work from home. For more information on the government guidance, please visit https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus.
We would also like to take this opportunity to reassure everyone that calls to the Meriden office are being monitored and redirected to Martin Atchison, Acting Head of the Programme.
We have a number of training courses planned, but due to current circumstances it is impossible to be clear whether these will go ahead. We will be posting regular updates on this website as the guidance changes. We will also be posting some guidance soon about continuing to support families in contact with services under the current restrictions.
Be kind, stay safe.
Martin Atchison
Acting Head of the Programme -
Recently, Julia Danks, Clinical Specialist from the Meriden Team was invited to be a panel member on the Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health Trust ‘Schwartz Round’ event, in to talk about her experience getting started with using Behavioural Family Therapy for the first time after training.
What Are Schwartz Rounds?
Schwartz Rounds provide a structured forum where all staff, clinical and non-clinical, come together regularly to discuss the emotional and social aspects of working in healthcare.
The purpose of Rounds is to understand the challenges and rewards that are intrinsic to providing care, not to solve problems or to focus on the clinical aspects of patient care. Rounds can help staff feel more supported in their jobs, to give them the time and space to reflect on their roles which they might not otherwise have in their everyday routines on busy hospital wards. Evidence shows that staff who attend Rounds feel less stressed and isolated, with increased insight and appreciation for each other’s roles. They also help to reduce hierarchies between staff and to focus attention on relational aspects of care.
The underlying premise for Rounds is that the compassion shown by staff can make all the difference to a patient’s experience of care, but that in order to provide compassionate care staff must, in turn, feel supported in their work.
Schwartz Rounds in Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust
Schwartz Rounds were introduced in Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust as part of a Trust-wide programme of initiatives aimed at enhancing staff wellbeing in January 2019. The Trust will be holding an event every six weeks on different sites during 2019.
Each Schwartz Round has a different theme and the focus of the event that Julia was invited to was ‘Patients, Families and Me’. Julia spoke about her experiences of working with her first family using Behavioural Family Therapy (BFT) after attending BFT training in 2004.
Initially Julia and her co-worker found it quite a daunting prospect but after working closely with the family they could see them start to use and develop their skills and life began to turn around for the family. This had a lasting impact on Julia’s work and helped her to see the value of involving whole families in the service user’s care. Something which continues to inform the way she works.
The benefits were experienced by all of the family as well as the service user and indeed the service felt the benefits too as the family were able to deal with issues themselves and crisis contact with the team reduced dramatically.
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Martin Atchison, Deputy Head of the Meriden Family Programme recently helped arrange for Dave Bell to visit Thomas Walunguba in Uganda at Moroto hospital. Dave works at St. Andrews hospital where Martin was speaking during one of their family work training courses and it was mentioned that Dave was visiting Uganda in the near future. Dave expressed an interest in visiting the mental health services in Moroto, and Martin put him in touch with Thomas.
Thomas Walunguba was the first person from Uganda to visit the Meriden Programme in 2012 and has been instrumental in embedding consistent support for families across the country. Thomas was happy to arrange the visit. Dave reported being very impressed with the level of care provided by Thomas’s team with limited resources, and also with the commitment of the staff working there to improve services for patients and their families.
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The Meriden Family Programme welcomed Nosa Igbinomwanhia to the office on 25th July. Nosa, pictured here, came to the UK in 2014 through the Commonwealth Fellowship Scheme from Benin, Nigeria with three colleagues. After completing a number of training courses with Meriden, Nosa returned to Nigeria and along with his other colleagues, Nkechi Igbinigie, Blessing Uteh and Felicia Thomas was able to successfully implement family work (BFT) in the hospital in Benin.
Nosa and colleagues were able to overcome challenges and create a BFT clinic in the Federal NeuroPsychiatric Hospital, Benin. Nosa reported that people pay out-of-pocket for their care and treatment in Nigeria, and because of this psychological interventions are seen as less acceptable, as something tangible such as medication is more likely to be perceived as value for money. Also, because family work had not been previously available, it was more difficult to ‘sell’ family work to families as it had not been tried and tested in Nigeria.
Nosa and colleagues had to be creative in order to get family work started and with the support of management, they were able to offer family work to the first few families at a significantly reduced cost. Once the benefits of family work had been evidenced in the hospital, family work was offered more routinely. More clinicians were trained in the hospital and the benefits of family work have become more widely accepted.
The Nigerian team is hopeful that as funding becomes more available, such as from hospital/government and possibly other sources like drug companies family work can be made more accessible to families at little cost to them.
We will be writing about the implementation of family work in Uganda and Nigeria in more detail in the future.