We recently had the pleasure of sponsoring, exhibiting and speaking at one of Open Forum’s Children and Young People’s mental health conferences. We spoke alongside our fantastic guest speakers: Sarah Cox, Service Manager, Mental Health and Wellbeing at Young Somerset, and Kate Gallagher, Clinical Lead for Mental Health in Schools Team at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust.
Having recently celebrated their 25 year anniversary, Young Somerset is the largest youth work charity in Somerset, commissioned to work in partnership with Somerset NHS Foundation Trust to deliver the Mental Health Support Team (MHST) in Somerset.
An overview of Somerset MHST’s early intervention support in schools:
The Somerset MHST offers mental health and early intervention support for children and young people aged 5-16. The teams are made up of Young Somerset’s Education Mental Health Practitioners (EMHPs), CAMHS Senior Mental Health Practitioners (SMHPs), Whole School Approach Practitioners and Clinical Leads.
Young Somerset Case Study
This collaborative model ensures support to young people as well as their parents, carers and staff in selected schools across Somerset.
The MHSTs deliver three core functions:
1. Deliver evidence-based early intervention services for mild-moderate mental health and emotional wellbeing needs
2. Support Senior Mental Health Leads in education settings to develop and introduce their whole school approach
3. Provide timely advice to staff and liaise with external specialist services so that children and young people can get the right support at the right time
You can watch the full presentation on YouTube
More than 300 mental health support teams have been established across the country and many of the services do things quite differently from one another. Kate and Sarah strongly recommend linking up with other mental health support teams to share your learning with one another. Sarah says, “there are definitely things we can learn from other MHSTs so always listening and talking to other services has been really important for us.”
Mayden has created a forum where MHSTs – and others working in mental health in education – can share and learn from each other. We host a “sharing and learning” webinar series, presented by guest speakers from MHSTs other CYP mental health services.
If you’d be interested in sharing your experience of working in an MHST as a guest speaker or would like to receive a notification about our next webinar please contact our event coordinator, Jen at jen.cable@mayden.co.uk
How Young Somerset uses iaptus CYP to inform and improve their services:
Young Somerset use Mayden’s flagship product – the iaptus CYP digital care record system – predominantly for data reporting and recording outcome measures in their MHST work. It’s extremely important to keep case notes and collect data, but it’s also about trying to focus on making that data useful and meaningful for the young people that they’re engaging with. The system supports practitioners to set goals with young people, enter Routine Outcome Measure (ROMS) in sessions and give immediate feedback on progress.
Crucially, Young Somerset also use iaptus CYP for data collection and reporting, to help track progress throughout their early interventions support in schools as well as reporting nationally to the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) on activity and outcomes of NHS commissioned support.
Find out how iaptus CYP can support your work with Children and young people at one of our “Supporting CYP mental health services” webinars.
