Articles

New Meriden Team Member

SCIE Think Family Update

Pre Therapy Workshop London 2012

Reaching Contact-impaired People: An Introduction to Prouty’s Pre-Therapy

Facilitated by: Dion Van Werde
Monday/Tuesday 16/17 January 2012

This workshop is one in a series entitled \'Person Centred Work at the Difficult Edge\'.   All the workshops will be facilitated by many of the international pioneers of this work and is intended to equip participants with the theory and practice to broaden the range of people they might be able to companion therapeutically.   Please follow the link below for details, information and booking form on the workshop.

New SCIE E-learning: Parental Mental Health

This newly launched Social Care Institute for Excellence e-learning resource is freely available to all and accessible on their website www.scie.org.uk.  It provides audio, video and interactive technology to assist in exploring the nature of parental mental health and its impact on families. Divided into 8 modules, it explores themes such as the “Family model”, the “Think child, think parent, think family” principles of the SCIE guide 30, whole family working and effective communication with families.

Sharing Information with Family & Friends Training

Tuesday 15th November 2011
The Uffculme Centre, Queensbridge Road, Moseley, Birmingham B13 8QY

• To clarify what is meant by confidentiality, information-sharing, and the different types of information.
• To encourage participants to reflect on issues relating to confidentiality and information-sharing.
• To explore the benefits of sharing information and of establishing more collaborative patterns of working.
• To reflect upon good practice strategies for sharing information with carers
• To discuss common scenarios and dilemmas that can arise in relation to information sharing, and how these can be addressed.

Team Travels to Nova Scotia

Dr Grainne Fadden, Meriden Family Programme Director, and Chris Mansell, Deputy Director, held two full-day workshops on June 21st and 22nd in Nova Scotia, Canada. The themes for the 2 sessions were "Developing Collaborative Practice between Consumers, Family Members and Service Providers" and "Information Sharing - Training the Trainer".

Dr. David Shiers, GP and family member, also made up part of the Meriden Family Programme presenting team. The sessions were extremely well received and plans are underway for the Programme to return in 2012.

The Capital Health  newsletter "Mental Health Happenings" reports on the visit.

Supporting Parents with Mental Health Problems

On 22nd September Paula Conneely and Julia Smith, Clinical Specialists with the Meriden Family Programme will be presenting at the Pavilion conference "Supporting parents with mental health issues and understanding the impact on their children "

In a recent article in the Guardian, Rhian Beynon, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Family Action commented:
"Up to 450,000 adults with mental health difficulties are also parents. Parental and child mental health are closely linked...While adults may succeed in obtaining treatment for mental health difficulties, health and social services often fail to consider the impact upon their family members – and often don’t want to pay for family-focused support.
Both a large body of clinical evidence and the experience of Family Action shows that parents with mental health difficulties can be great parents providing they get support to manage their condition, run their household and care for their children.
The prevention of children’s mental health difficulties, therefore, starts more often than not with integrated health and social services support for their parents.’ Source: www.guardian.co.uk

This conference addresses how services need to work on behalf of both parent and child in order to manage the impact on the child, whilst supporting the parent. Speakers also include representatives from Family Action, MIND, Barnardos and the Department of Health.

conference programme.pdf

Carers Matter – Everybody’s Business (CMEB)

CMEB has been developed in partnership with carers, carers organisations and major stakeholders including the Meriden Family Programme. It was commissioned by the Department of Health to provide a set of common core principles and national standards for working with carers. CMEB is a free at the point of access learning and development framework with supporting resources for general and specialist use across a wide range of organisations.

Opportunity for Family Work Training in Manchester

The Meriden programme is pleased to offer an exciting 5-day training opportunity in family work in Central Manchester, 10th October - 14 October, which we hope will appeal to clinicians who are unable to attend training in Birmingham.  For more details please see the event document under the Training and Conferences link.

Newsletter - May 2011

The latest volume of the Meriden newsletter (May 2011) has been published and you can find a copy of this on our  website.