Tameside, Oldham & Glossop Mind (TOG Mind) provides emotional health and wellbeing Services to children, young people, parents/carers and professionals. Our Youth in Mind services are aimed at providing prevention and early intervention services directly to children and young people and those that support them. We deliver both educational and therapeutic interventions to support children and young people to get the help and support they need, as soon as they need it.
Co-Production
From start: No
During process: Yes
In evaluation: Yes
Evaluation
Peer: Yes
Academic: No
PP Collaborative: Yes
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Nicola Harrison - Youth in Mind Director, Tameside, Oldham and Glossop Mind
Tameside, Oldham & Glossop Mind (TOG Mind) provides emotional health and wellbeing Services to children, young people, parents/carers and professionals. Our Youth in Mind services are aimed at providing prevention and early intervention services directly to children and young people and those that support them. We deliver both educational and therapeutic interventions to support children and young people to get the help and support they need, as soon as they need it.
The difference we make to children and young people’s lives and the wider community is huge, in 2016-2017 alone we were able to raise awareness of emotional health and wellbeing across three local authority boroughs reaching over 20,000 children and young people through their school or college. Through our 1-1 therapeutic work we have supported over 1000 children and young people to be able to cope better with the difficulties they are facing in their lives with 98% of children and young people stating they would recommend our services to a family member or friend.
TOG Mind strives to provide effective support to children and young people where they want to access it, via designated hubs, through community centres and through schools we are able to offer children and young people the opportunity to engage in awareness raising sessions, resilience workshops creative art sessions, facilitated self-help support and psychoeducational courses in anxiety, anger and mindfulness. We also provide signposting information and guidance to children, young people, parents/carers and professionals so everyone is working together to better support children and young people with their emotional health and wellbeing needs.
Wider Active Support
TOG Mind work in collaboration with a number of different statutory and third sector organisations in the development and delivery of all our services particularly schools within our communities. Through our Oldham-based services we have worked in partnership with Positive Steps, Oldham CCG and Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust CAMHS Service, Healthy Young Minds, Action Together and Mahdlo Youth Zone, designated children and young peoples service. We have actively engaged in local incentives and projects regarding participation of children and young people such as MH2K project and work with Oldham youth Council.
Through our Tameside-based services we have worked in partnership with local third sector organisations such as, Branching Out, Off the Record, The Anthony Seddon Fund and Children in the Environment; as well as statutory partners such as Tameside MBC Public Health and Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust CAMHS Service, Healthy Young Minds.
Our Rochdale service is delivered as part of an integrated service hub with Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust and Link4Life, third sector organisation, we also link in with Enlightening, Cartwheel Arts and Sow the City as part of our alternative activities for children and young people.
TOG Mind continuously engages new partners in service development, design and delivery and believes partnership working supports providing a holistic effective service for children, young people and their families.
Co-Production
TOG Mind values feedback from all those accessing or working in partnership with our services; all of our current services include collecting feedback directly from children, young people and their parents/carers. All services delivered including our education based services required children and young people to provide us with information about what they found useful or where we can improve our services.
Recently, via feedback from children and young people one of our schools-based psycho-educational courses has been re-developed. Through delivering to children and young people we found that some of the activities used within the sessions were not fun and interactive, which children and young people said would support in them engaging more in sessions, based on this feedback our experienced practitioners worked together to revise the content to be delivered in schools following summer holidays.
Another example of co-production is taking place within a Family Early Intervention model, delivered in partnership with Positive Steps, we are working with families in an asset-based approach to support them to become more resilient and improve their wellbeing; we are currently piloting the service with a select group of families who will then provide feedback about their experiences in order to support the development of the service before it is offered our more widely in the region.
Finally, we have engaged with a number of co-design approaches through the development of our Rochdale-based service #Thrive, which maintained children and young people’s views and opinions as the core of what we do. Children and young people are able to provide suggestions and feedback on an ongoing basis at both of our designated hubs to try to continuously improve their experience with us and that of other young people.
Looking Back/Challenges Faced
We developed our Youth in Mind Services four years ago; at that time we were keen to offer educational and therapeutic services to children and young people which we welcoming, non-stigmatising and supporting in children and young people maintaining or improving their emotional wellbeing. We were very passionate about allowing children and young people to access services without thresholds or needing a diagnosed mental health condition. Through our current schools education programme we have been able to provide information, guidance and signposting support to thousands of young people who may not have accessed services or recognised they needed help.
A main challenge is that of funding for services; we are a third sector organisation responsible for accessing funding independently of any other support and at times it can be difficult to provide a consistent effective service for young people without the guarantee of funding; we have however developed positive working relationships with local commissioners and have been able to secure funding for our educational services for a universal offer for Tameside Primary Schools.
Another challenge is maintaining a good understanding of the local landscape and the needs of young people; one of the main reasons why we are committed to gaining feedback from young people is because we want to be sure we are offering services which meet their ever-changing needs and that the services are being effective in the support they are offering.
Sustainability
In January 2017, TOG Mind decided to restructure our services to provide our Youth in Mind services with designated children and young peoples teams; we have recruited staff from director level to frontline staff who have numerous years experience of working with children and young people and offering different interventions for children and young people. As TOG Mind has invested in developing a designated department for our Youth In Mind services we are confident our projects will go from strength to strength.
Evaluation (Peer or Academic)
Our Youth in Mind Services are so varied that they are evaluated on an ongoing basis; one of our projects delivered in 2014-2015 was independently evaluated in partnership with National Mind and other Local Mind Association, we delivered resilience workshops and early intervention services to children and young people through a selected group of schools and the impact was evaluated via SDQ rating scores.
We continue to evaluate our services as stated above we have re-developed psychoeducational course based on feedback and outcomes achieved by children and young people to continue improvements. We are currently researching evaluation opportunities via CORC and EBPU through Anna Freud Centre.
Outcomes
Youth in Mind services have supported children and young people to access educational and therapeutic support services developed to support in sustaining or improving their wellbeing and outcomes in their lives. Through all of our services we evaluated whether children and young people have received the support they need and we continue to receive feedback which suggests very high number of children and young people do improve their wellbeing as a result of accessing our services.
An example of this can be seen through our early intervention and prevention services delivered across Oldham via schools and the community, on average 80% of children and young people accessing our therapeutic services reporting an improvement in their wellbeing, via YPCORE collection through services on average 50% of children and young people accessing services showed improvement with 90% of children and young people maintaining a level of wellbeing as a result of accessing our services.
Maintaining positive emotional health and wellbeing is so intrinsically linked to positive outcomes and achievements for children and young people; our Youth in Mind services are committed to continuing to support children and young people through educational and therapeutic services to support in the prevention or early intervention of difficulties they may face which will impact upon their wellbeing and by doing so are committed to continuing to achieve outcomes for children and young people.
Sharing
As we are a local Mind organisation we are committed to sharing our work through their national network of Local Mind Associations; were possible we would like to share the learning and outcomes achieved through our services with wider children and young people services and are currently exploring how we may be able to do this. We have supported on national children and young peoples mental health conferences to showcase particular services or partnership working and would be committed to doing so in the future.
