Change The Way You Think

Recently I went along to one of our Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service’s stress management classes to see for myself what they were about and see if I could change the way I think. After all, we have pre-conceived ideas about things especially if it is something unknown. The service said to me that people have misconceptions about the classes; that people will expect you to speak as though you’re at an Alcoholics Anonymous class i.e. ‘Hello my name is Andrew and I’m stressed’ – you don’t.  And nor do you have get on a sofa and talk about your childhood.

The session I went to took place during the evening at Leeds college of music. On arriving, there was a discrete sign by the front desk and a friendly receptionist directed me to the first floor room where the session was held.

The start of the class felt like any training I have been to in my professional life. The two facilitators, who led the session, greeted people as they arrived, checked them in and passed on an evaluation form. There was some nice gentle guitar music playing and jugs of water were available if you wanted to grab a drink.

With the session being the sixth course in the series there was a brief re-cap of what had been covered so far by Jake, one of the facilitators. The main theme for this session was sleep, and how to get a better night. There were lots of practical tips like not using laptops and phones just before bed to help you drop off (something I maybe need to remember).  We were also given advice on the things like the temperature of the bedroom and having blackout blinds. One of the interesting tips that the other facilitator, Alice, gave was setting aside worry time. This is the idea that if you are a worrier you stop yourself from doing it all the time and set aside 30 minutes to reflect on your problems and stop worry from dominating other things.

There are more details of who’d benefit from the courses and how to access them online at LeedsIAPT.com. The courses run on a regular basis so new ones are starting all the time.

Andrew Carver, Communications officer, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust

Unfreezing the brain - recovering from post traumatic stress

Monday mornings are a morning of EMDR (Eye Movement, Desensitisation and Reprocessing), my favourite. As an EMDR therapist my job is to work with people who are struggling with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) – as a result of any kind of trauma: being in a war zone; rape; accidents; assaults; torture; really any kind of trauma that can happen to you as an adult. 1 in 3 people after a traumatic event can develop PTSD, it’s a horrible thing to have to live with – flashbacks to the events, nightmares about the trauma, feeling constantly anxious and like you’re under attack. Like a walking, talking burglar alarm, always on alert for danger. And sometimes not being able to face certain things related to the trauma e.g. can’t go to the place where it happened, and then this escalates and can stop you getting out of the house, can’t stay in your house… You get my drift. 

The clients I am seeing this morning don’t really fit the norm for our bread and butter EMDR work. The first lady I’ve been seeing for a couple of months and she’s doing really well, we’re almost done. As a result of a number of traumas through childhood and adulthood, she has a phobia of choking and hasn’t eaten solid food for six months, living off Complans, you know liquid food drinks. We’ve been working through a long list of ‘small’ traumas (these don’t feel small to her of course) and now cheesy chips and bacon are featuring prominently in her recovery.

Because life is never straight forward, this client also has checking behaviours (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and if I thought about it hard, would also fit the diagnostic criteria for GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder) and as we treat the traumas / phobia these other issues are also getting better. Working with this case has been an absolute joy for me, the client is so lovely, we have a good laugh although we are dealing with some difficult stuff and I get the pleasure of watching someone recover, enjoy eating again (what’s not to like about that) and also make other positive changes in her life.

So to EMDR. Eye Movement, Desensitisation and Reprocessing, it’s a bad title I know and it’s hard to spell. Let me try and explain what it is us EMDR therapists do. Most of the time your body copes with new information and experiences without you being aware of it. It is believed that this happens whilst we are asleep, particularly during rapid eye movement sleep. When something out of the ordinary occurs you can become traumatised by the event or by being repeatedly subjected to distress.

These experiences then become frozen in the brain and are stored in the limbic system, which is the primitive bit of our brain that deals with senses, emotions and it’s all raw. It’s the caveman / cavewoman bit of our brain – fight, flight, freeze. And when information gets stuck here – it gets re-triggered all the time usually with the symptoms of PTSD. I think of this bit of our brain as our downstairs brain (above the back of your neck). Your ‘upstairs brain’ is where we process information and experiences so they become a memory or part of our past, also known as the pre frontal lobe, (front / top of your head) which deals with reasoning, problem solving, emotional intelligence, all that kind of thing.

EMDRs job is to help move the information from a trauma from downstairs to upstairs in your brain, which given we normally do this whilst asleep, is a natural healing process. There’s some controversy at times in the world of psychology / research about how EMDR actually does work. I really don’t care, it just does and I get to see it happen.

We start off with a thorough assessment, then prepare for treatment. Then we ask specific questions about a particular disturbing memory and use either eye movements or theratappers (which buzz alternately in either hand) to replicate what happens whilst we are asleep. With repeated sets of this, the memory tends to change so it loses the distress associated with it and becomes a neutral past memory. Sometimes this can happen in one session, other times it takes longer but what is great is seeing people not only get rid of those negative symptoms of PTSD but also seeing positive benefits for clients in other areas of their lives as well. It’s a real privilege. 

Enough theory, my next client is struggling with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I am seeing her as part of a research trial. She is doing well, although she has had OCD for years and years and years, not been able to work, and has been stuck in her flat, not seeing many people. She struggles to see sometimes how well she is doing and today was one of them days. I was (hopefully) top cheerleader today and she managed to achieve something in the session today, that in our first session she told me she could never even contemplate doing. Go Girl! 

Afternoon is being on duty for the service. Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners (PWPs) are on the phones taking self-referrals as they come in. My job is to be on call to give advice and support them in making decisions about treatment options etc., deal with any other new referrals coming into the service from other professionals, crisis calls, whatever. I think there’s a bit of snobbery sometimes from other professionals about PWPs, but I’ll tell you they do a really hard job really well and I’m always impressed by how good they all are on the phones.

Zoe Marsden – Senior Mental Health Practitioner and EMDR Therapist, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust

 

Takeover Day

We are year 6 pupils from Gledhow Primary School and we are dementia friends.

 

We have had the amazing opportunity to be part of the NHS Takeover day at the Shine Centre in Harehills. Takeover day is where children get to take over the world of work and this has been an amazing opportunity to learn about Dementia  and how it affects the sufferer we learned how to approach and talk to someone with dementia.

Today was a special day because there was some new staff for the NHS here for induction .we made a display board about dementia friends and showed it in a market stall for takeover day. New NHS staff were looking at the different stalls. Bunting and drawings were used to attract their attention, sometimes they came to ours, so we asked them a question ‘If someone reacted to you in a strange way, how would you deal with it?’   Also we had the opportunity to browse the stalls ourselves finding out about other parts of the NHS. We were able to go around and ask people in the NHS about what their favourite bit in their job. I have learnt a lot about what peoples jobs are in the NHS such as; library services, weight management, safe guarding, trade union and a lot more.

We think it was really fun and informative and think that it should definitely happen again!

Written by:

Marley, Hussein, Evie, Charlotte, Ewan, Lucy, Aimee and Mohsin

I get by with a little help from my friends

Recently I became a Dementia Friend.

Su McAlpin, Dementia Friends Champion at
LCH with 'Gina'  

I have a personal interest in the Dementia Friends campaign but in my role of Communications officer at Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust, I went along to one of the trust's training sessions to see what it involves and how we could help promote the campaign internally to colleagues.

On arriving at the session, I explained to the leaders I was there from a ‘comms perspective’ and said I would sit to one side so not to disrupt the session. I was encouraged to take part; I didn’t realise anyone could become a Dementia Friend, you don’t need to be a healthcare professional. The awareness is useful, regardless of whether you’re at work or doing the weekly shop.

The training session is just an hour long but gives you a really good insight in to what things we can do to make our community dementia friendly. There are lots of great analogies that help you to understand what it can be like for a person with dementia. For example, you’re walking in to a health centre and there is a black mat at the entrance. You would cross the mat, enter the building and go on to attend your appointment. To a person with dementia, they may see the mat as a black hole and don’t want to step on to it for fear of falling in to it. This could make them scared to access the building and prevent them from going to their appointment.

After talking to the trust’s Dementia Friends Champion, Su McAlpin, I found out that around 100 of the trust’s front of house staff have been trained as Dementia Friends recently with more to follow. They’re the first people that greet patients so it’s important they recognise the signs and know how to support someone. Su is running a number of training sessions internally and also externally - recently, she spoke to a local Beavers group. We’re also looking at all our buildings to make sure they are dementia friendly too.

The campaign is aiming to create 1 million dementia friends by 2015. You don’t need to go along to a session, you can also sign up to be a dementia friend online at www.dementiafriends.org.uk 

Let’s all help to make Leeds a dementia friendly community!

Sarah Elwell, Communications officer

@LCHNHSTrust 

#DementiaFriends

Helping peple feel less alone

Alice Curling, who facilities our stress control classes, blogs about her work as part of the Leeds IAPT service.

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"I have been interested in mental health ever since studying psychology at A-level about 10 years ago and since then I have studied, worked or volunteered in or around the field of mental health.

I have worked for the Leeds IAPT service for just over a year now and am really enjoying my job. Of course there are difficult days when things haven’t gone as well as you would hope or when sessions are difficult, but the good days; when you can see people improving, really make up for it.

My job is also really varied; I do face to face and telephone assessments, one to one treatment sessions and have recently begun to facilitate a stress control class. The class was definitely outside of my comfort zone, but I’m really pleased that I put myself forward for it. The classes cover very similar material to what we would usually use in one to one sessions but you are able to reach more people in a shorter space of time. We also get to cover a range of interventions which we sometimes don’t have the time to do in the one to one sessions. The course material has also taught me new things and techniques which I have incorporated into my one to one sessions.

Facilitating the class has definitely improved my understanding of stress and has improved my one to one practise at the same time. I would certainly encourage other workers to facilitate the groups. Although you don’t get the same immediate feedback from people that you get from one to one sessions, you can see the improvement in many people. I would also definitely encourage people who think they would benefit from attending the class to contact the service. Many people fear a group or class situation but once you come you will see it’s not as bad as you think! People are also surprised at just how many people are going through similar difficulties as them which can help people feel less alone.

I am learning all the time, not only from my colleagues but from people accessing the service as well. No day is ever the same, and I hope I can continue to learn and grow so that I am constantly improving my practise."

Alice Curling - Stress control class facilitator

Desperately seeking patients...the NHS, really?

The idea of 'marketing' services and seeking out patients for some in the NHS is seen as a bit of a taboo, even for experienced communicators, like myself, who have worked in NHS communications and public relations for over 11 years (and for over 18 years in total).

'Change the way you think' campaign poster

Very often we have great service and staff stories to tell and this can be done very easily through local media and increasingly, through social media.  Sometimes we have an even bigger message that we must tell as many people as possible and we need to turn to marketing tactics to help spread the word.

However when spreading that word is also about a subject such as mental health, it gets trickier again.  For some this is a taboo, something we can't even chat about with mates at the pub.  In fact it's just those people our current mental health campaign is aiming to reach.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT for short in the NHS filled world of jargon and acronyms) exist to help people find ways to cope with emotional stresses and strains, depression and anxiety that just won't go away and the overwhelming feelings some of us can be faced with at one point or another in our lives.

Across the country these services get a poor reputation as they're really hard to access due to waiting times being up to a year in some places. We have great commissioners who have ensured these services have good resources so anyone who needs to can get help the same day - you can even join one of our stress management seminars the following week.

But we just don't think enough people know about this service. So we have enlisted the help of the creative types at DS.Emotion and we've been working together on ideas for a campaign to make people think again about mental health services and to think if they could actually benefit from the help and support of our skilled team.

Put simply ,our campaign says to people with emotional problems, those feeling stressed or anxious, "Time to change the way you think" - and for those who access our service, that's just what we aim to do.

It's been no mean feat; in just around a month we've discussed ideas and concepts to really try and help to change the way people think, reviewed and tested messages, designed and tweaked creative visuals and launched the campaign.  In about a month! We're really proud of the work we've created with DS.Emotion and the support we've had from the experts at Boutique Media and from our colleagues in the IAPT team and others across our organisation.  

As you read this, our really important messages are on local radio in Leeds, on buses around the city, at railway stations and on social media - they'll be dropping through thousands of letter boxes around Leeds in the next couple of weeks too.

Awareness of mental health issues has changed radically in recent years, we have a great service in Leeds to help you or someone you may know, so let's all change the way we think about mental health.  

www.iaptleeds.com

Gillian Neild, Communications, PR and Marketing Manager, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust

@GillianNeild

All part of an NHS PR person's day's work

Okay so you all think the world of public relations is glamorous right? Well, maybe... Even in the NHS it's that buzzy team in the office coming up with the vibrant ideas and always talking (or tweeting) very loudly about it - when we're not out to lunch that is!

Hannah and myself at the RCN stand

Well I would like to set the record straight here and now.  Firstly, yes I am very proud that myself and my brilliant team of Sarah, Mandy, Hannah and Andrew occupy the buzzy, vibrant area of Stockdale House in Headingley and yes we do have some great ideas - we may not share some of the wilder ones with the rest of the organisation - but I am proud of everything we do.  Yes we do bake a good cake to accompany our fresh coffee or Earl Grey tea and we do enjoy the odd lunch at Hyde Park Corner or in Headingley if we're celebrating something special - but I like to think we're known for turning work around and getting some brilliant results.

Above all else, we're focussed on the needs of our organisation, our services, our staff and the patients and their families we serve - we use our communications expertise to share messages and seek engagement with key individuals and groups.

This week's activities that fall within the remit of "all in a PR person's day's work" are possibly on the less glamorous side.  Our work has involved having lots of lovingly branded items made for our current recruitment campaign.  So count them: 1,000 hessian bags, 1,000 hand sanitisers, 1,000 trolley coins, 1,000 torches, 1,000 water bottles, 10,000 (yes 10,000) pens oh and before I forget (not that it is possible to), the 1,000 air freshener dangly things fragranced with jasmine - and yes, I do regret giving Mandy and Hannah free reign to choose the scent as it's all you can smell in our office right now!  I also regret the hessian bag choice, well I don't because it looks fabulous, but when you have eczema on your hands, handling hessian bags makes your eczema bleed - but it doesn't make me exempt from mucking in to help the team effort!

Before and after 

It's all focussed on how we attract new talent to our organisation to be the future of community healthcare in our brilliant city of Leeds. We have some challenges in terms of vacancies within some of our services so it's our job as comms people to get some great messages out about working for our organisation and to make this sound attractive as possible.

So we made the biggest production line in Stockdale House history (our Leeds head office) to put one of each branded item into each hessian bag, as we've been attending some jobs fairs in Leeds in the last week to attract new staff to our current vacancies in our organisation.  Attending the fairs means getting the 1,000 filled bags to each venue and setting up what is for us, a bit of an ambitious exhibition stand.  But we're taking it in our stride and doing quite well actually!

Today and tomorrow we're at the Royal College of Nursing Jobs Fair in New Dock Hall, Clarence Dock, Leeds. Myself and Hannah from the team have been lugging round said goodie bags and lots of other boxes and racks, as well as putting up our gargantuan display graphics that include our fab campaign strapline: "A passion for community services" - that's us in 5 words - at the venue yesterday so we can attract some lovely new staff to our organisation.  So if you're interested in nursing or indeed any other role in a community focussed organisation then do stop by any time from 10am - 5pm - we're on stand number 15.  

And we have some great goodie bags to give away...in case you hadn't guessed.  Here's hoping for a great event and some new staff to join our community based organsiation.

P.S. Before I go, I just wanted to add that it's Sarah's birthday this week, so if you need us, we're out to lunch on Friday trying to put a little glamour back into our week!

P.P.S. We do have a vacancy coming up in the team so if this post has attracted you to our heady world of hessian bags, glamorous exhibitions and the odd team lunch, keep an eye on NHS Jobs for the details.

Gillian Neild, Communications, PR and Marketing Manager, Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust

@GillianNeild