Consultancy

When working with human beings, the emotional impact of caring for those who find it hard to accept care can be profound.  Often our clientele have been let down, neglected and/or abused by those who might have been expected to protect them.  This leads to difficulties in their ongoing relationships with health professionals.

Individual/Team Supervision

A regular space to discuss the difficulties of the work, the impact on the staff and service user and essentially, a plan of action to move forward.  Jointly facilitated by our expert clinicians and experts by experience, the sessions promote an empathic understanding of difficulties, and focus on thoughtful responses based on facts rather than traditional thoughts or prescribed beliefs.

Complex Case discussion

A stand alone case conference to identify the goals, risks, learning opportunities and ways forward for teams and clients who are particularly stuck.  Our service user consultants help to bring an authentic understanding of challenging presentations and the potential impact and interpretations of what we consider care.  These sessions are aimed at developing a more nuanced understanding of complexity, building a team formulation and using this as the basis for further decision making. 

Independent assessment and risk formulation

It is our firm belief that the knowledge and solutions for working with complex clients lie within the treating team.  On occasion teams benefit from a new perspective to enrich their understanding of their client.  We offer a review of clinical notes, interview with the client and a risk formulation based on what is likely to occur consistent with previous actions and opposed to basing interventions on the worst possible scenario.  We focus on the client's strengths, safety behaviours, capacity to make decisions and potential for long term improvement verses short term relief.  From this we can outline a strategy for ongoing treatment that allows the client to retain autonomy while maintaining coping methods that are potentially harmful.  Often interventions aimed at keeping people safe can inadvertently lead to increased self harm and potentially higher risk of death. 

Organisational Observation & Consultation

At times staff are aware that there are difficulties in their environment but find it hard to articulate them so that they can be worked on.  This can lead to splits in the team, locating problems in individuals or increased sickness and burnout.  This package involves our experts spending time to observe, speak to those in the environment and feedback observations in a way the team can understand and action.