Anna Burhouse is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist at 2gether NHS Foundation Trust. She is also a Health Foundation improvement fellow, as well as being Director of Quality Development at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. In today’s blog, Anna shares with us her experiences of introducing a recovery college for young people, known as a ‘discovery college’.
Coaching for recovery
In 2011 2gether NHS Foundation Trust was awarded a Health Foundation Shine award to establish a recovery college. Recovery colleges work to support adults with mental health difficulties by providing a range of educational courses. Read more about those here.
Our work on the recovery college was independently evaluated and quantitative data was collected from focus groups, with all students invited to join in the ongoing co-production process to improve the college. At this time, several students in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s told us that they wish they’d had access to a recovery college when they were first diagnosed in their teenage and early adulthood years.
This got us thinking, and two of the younger students took me to one side and asked if we could work together to set up a version of the recovery college for younger people. They had great ideas about how our Coaching for Recovery course could be adapted to meet younger people’s needs and how young people could act as ‘peer leads’.
As a child and adolescent mental health specialist, I was delighted to support their ideas, and could see that emerging knowledge about adolescent brain development could be integrated into the course curriculum.
Adapting the course
Over the next 18 months we worked hard, meeting in cafes in the early evenings and at weekends to design a course that we felt kept all of the amazing aspects of the original work but made it more interactive and appealing to young people through language, humour and materials, and by incorporating relevant issues like the use of social media. The personal stories from peer leads provided real life examples of things that young people told us mattered to them – like how to manage illness, distress, anxiety, hearing voices, triggers, keeping safe, making friends, managing obsessions, physical health, body image, bullying, gender identity, understanding yourself and others and how to change unhelpful thought patterns.
We chose to call the recovery college for young people a ‘discovery college’, referencing the idea that while recovery colleges help adults get back to wellness and living the life they want, young people may not yet have discovered what they want to do in life and what their version of ongoing wellness is.
We tested the course out and, as with all our work, used quality improvement methods to measure our success. To our surprise, we found that young people needed longer to bond as a group and that the original six week format of the course didn’t work – it needed to be extended. We changed the course length to eight weeks with an additional ‘discovery day’ where the students design a day together to further integrate their learning.
Outcomes for young people
Outcomes have been harder to measure than in the original course as we have not had any funding for an independent evaluation, but we can see from pre and post outcome measures and personal testimony that the course has had an impact on people’s lives. Many young people describe feeling that the course gives them more confidence, helps them to feel less lonely, gives them skills and strategies to better manage their difficulties and reminds them of their many strengths and talents.
We see many young people making progress with their life goals. Some young people have even chosen to transition from being a student on the course to becoming a co-production contributor and then as their confidence and skills grow they have become ‘peer leads’, using this experience to ‘give something back’ and also develop skills, improving their CVs.
Inspiring others to join the ‘discovery college’ family
This work is a total delight. I contribute to the delivery of the course as a volunteer through the great support of colleagues at 2gether NHS Foundation Trust, Gloucestershire CCG and other key stakeholders. I’d love to see a discovery college in every secondary school and university in the country. If I had more time, that’s what I’d be campaigning to achieve.
Through this blog I hope to spread the message so that maybe, just maybe, someone reading this decides to start a discovery college in their area. If that person is you, then do let me know and we will happily share advice and materials to get you going so that you can join the ‘discovery college’ family. If you’re keen, you can contact me via Twitter. I’d love to hear from you.
