Barnsley Family and Friends Team – Carer Support

Newsletter F&F Team – Sept-Dec 24 (DOCX, 293 KB)

The Family & Friends Team

We recognise carers as experts and as  individuals with their own choices, aspirations and needs. Caring for someone with a mental health condition can be stressful and can affect your own health and wellbeing.  Our involvement can help you maintain good mental health and give you additional tools to your toolkit.

Kathryn Hines – Family & Friends Practitioner/Carers Champion

Kathryn joined the Family and Friends Team recently but has over 25 years’ experience in working within the NHS in various roles both clinical and non-clinical. Over the years she has worked in hospital and community and public services. She worked throughout the Covid 19 pandemic at Barnsley Hospital and alongside this worked for Public Health England as a Covid Clinical Case Worker.

Having studied psychology at a further education level and having a Bachelor of Science Honours Degree (BSc Hons) in Health and Social Care gives Kathryn a sound academic building block on which to base the Family and Friends practitioner post. She has an understanding and knowledge of psychology, motivational behaviour change, diet and nutrition/eating disorders, health psychology, health and wellbeing and delivering psychoeducation.

Kathryn has Post graduation education which gives the underpinning skills and knowledge in Nutrition and Public Health Management. All this especially her kind, mindful and caring nature more than equips her to be a part of the Family and Friends Team.

Vicky Beaumont – Family & Friends Practitioner

Vicky joined the Family and Friends Team recently but has over 20 years’ experience in working within the NHS.  Over the past three years Vicky has been working as a Social Prescriber.

Vicky has lived experience of being a carer for family members who have both a physical and mental health diagnosis.  This gives her knowledge of the difficulties carers can have and helps within her role as a Family & Friends Practitioner.

What we do….  Following completion of a Carer’s Needs Assessment, we will then Collaboratory identify aspirations and goals to work with.

What we offer….

• Empowerment in identifying and meeting your own needs as a carer including finding your way around local services.
• Psychosocial interventions to help manage stress related to your caring role.
• Psychoeducation on signs and symptoms of mental health.
•  We work flexibly providing face to face 1:1 sessions.
•  We liaise with other services that can support you in your caring role.

What else can you expect?

We draw on the ‘Triangle of Care’ in Barnsley mental health services. This means that we are committed to collaboration between service users, their family/significant others, and the service providers.  A number of values guide the way we work together across the triangle including;

• Keeping the service user at the centre of service provision.
• Friends, family carers are integral to what we do.
• Being respectful.
• Open & honest.
• Confidential.
• Collaboratively working together and problem solving issues as they arise.

We will work with you as a partner.  This means we will:-

1. Listen to what you say and communicate clearly with you without jargon.
2. Respect your role as a carer and trust that you are the “expert by experience” in the support of the person you care for.

3. Work with you to overcome barriers to giving support by sharing information and respecting patient confidentiality.

We will support you to get help and assistance when you need it.  This means we will:-

1. Respond in a flexible and timely way to help you access support during challenging periods.
2. Signpost you to relevant information and advice and other services.
3. Provide support which is tailored to suit your personal needs.

4. Have a ‘whole family’ approach to supporting carers, recognising the   needs of young carers.

We will train our staff to be aware of carers needs.  This means we will:-

1. Ensure our staff can identify carers and recognise their role as partners.
2. Involve our staff in developing information and support for carers.
3. Train and guide community services in recognising meeting carers needs.

Carers Passport

This is a record which identifies a carer.

It sets out offers of support, services or other benefits.

A carer passport helps to improve and embed identification, recognition and support for carers in the day-to-day life of an organisation or community.   find our more:-    www.southwestyorkshire.nhs.uk/service-users-and-carers/carers-passport/

 

Carer RSTC Course – (Recovery Skills Training course) – The Cabin at Kendray 

Are you currently in a caring role?     Do you need help looking after your own wellbeing?

This interactive course will help you to develop new skills focusing on your own mental health and wellbeing and will give you the tools you need to look after yourself.

Modules include:

• Improving self-care
• Dealing with feelings
• Changing unhelpful thinking
• Concluding with putting it all together

It’s important you attend the taster session on to learn more about what the course entails and level of commitment needed.

If you are interested in registering – please contact Kathryn Hines 07425 737 334 

Here are a few of our learner’s testimonies that have recently completed the course:-

“I was hesitant at first to attend the RSTC as I didn’t feel I needed to; however, I am so pleased I went ahead.  The course has really helped me to identify areas in my life that I was neglecting. I thought I was coping, but I quickly realised as the course went on, that I wasn’t caring for my own needs, and that I needed to take more care of myself to enable me to be healthy and strong enough to care for others.   The tutors were excellent, and I felt able to share my feelings with them and the group in the knowledge that everything we spoke about was confidential. The tutors and the group also contributed their experiences which was really helpful as it made me realise that I was not on my own, and they also offered up solutions which had helped them to cope, which in turn I have used in my own life.

If anyone is thinking about attending this course and are feeling reluctant or apprehensive about it, I would highly recommend you do. I have felt so much better after attending and I have continued to work on practising the techniques they have given me to cope with things, on both a personal and a practical level”   Barbara Smith – December 2021

This course has taught me that there are no deadlines to your learning and that even though I’m older now, there’s always things to learn and new ways of putting these into practice.  There are sections which I thought weren’t relevant at first, but I still managed to take some ideas that worked.     

This course has been very good for me I’m so glad I did it, it’s been a very pleasant journey!  I’m so grateful.      

“Overall we have learned so much, coping strategies and a toolbox that we can use to continue our journeys.” March 2023 

 

 

 

 

Take a look at our Carers’ Passport

There’s also lots of Information in our Carer’s resources section of the website!