End Of Year Round Up From Mental Health Services
Youth Matters Awards
The Mental Health Services team were very excited and glammed up to attend the Youth Matters Awards in London on Friday 18th November. We made the final of the Health & Wellbeing Project of the Year category. It was great to be ‘out out’ and to see colleagues from the Easy Peasy Pods project there too. Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but this did not take away from the extreme pride and gratitude we felt for the work we have been able to contribute to over the past year. We drew inspiration from all of the other amazing projects and growth happening across YMCAs in England and Wales, and it was a great night all round.
A massive THANK YOU to the sessional staff who deliver all of the programmes and vital support to young people, parents & staff when they most need it!
Clinical news
The team continues to grow with demand for support rising. We are therefore delighted to welcome Simi Mackay as our new business administrator apprentice. She started on the 1st December and will be supporting the whole mental health services team.
We also celebrated with Heather as she completed her apprenticeship 4 months early and starts her role as a permanent Administration Assistant.
We are looking for opportunities to be able to offer counselling more within the community so if you know of any youth organisations that would like to offer therapeutic support to the children and young people, they work, with please let us know … our waiting list is much shorter than the NHS!
The counselling provision across the accommodation settings is now well established with 90% of sessions being attended by residents since April ‘22. This is fantastic as it gives the residents the greatest chance of reaching their full; potential. A positive example of accommodation and mental health service teams working together and we hope to do more of this with other teams next year!
Training news
We have had a busy few weeks working on lots of different things including reaching out to schools in our area that may wish to book various training courses with us, and rolling out a Senior Mental Health Lead training, that is a nationally recognised programme.
We have also been successful with two recent funding bids, which we are very excited about!
One of them is to undertake a self-assessment of mental health support for staff internally and come up with an action plan, which is perfect timing following on from the HIVE survey. The other is to provide staff training to some small charities in Suffolk to improve their confidence in supporting themselves and their clients. Both of these projects are due to start early next year
Over the coming weeks and months, we are also looking forward to working closely with our colleagues in accommodation settings in Ipswich and Cambridge. We are aiming to design and co-produce a bespoke programme of training to both support their valuable work and ensure they can prioritise their own wellbeing.
Finally, we have been working across the team to make better connections using LinkedIn and Twitter – this has been both challenging for us ‘social media shy types’ but also a great learning experience too. If you can help us spread the word by following us and sharing our posts, it would be much appreciated.
https://twitter.com/YMCA_Wellbeing
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ymcamhs/
