4 minute read
South West England
Best Practice
Devon Partnership NHS Trust
Chaplaincy within the new Community Mental Health Framework Devon Partnership NHS Trust’s Chaplaincy department was created in December 2019. We spent the first two years building capacity to provide a chaplaincy presence on all of our inpatient wards – a mixture of staff and badged chaplaincy volunteers.
It is vital that everybody, without exception, has access to services that support our holistic care of a person’s physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.
We are developing a pilot to engage within community services, as part of the new Community Mental Health Framework (CMHF). The project, which we believe will be of national significance, aims to place chaplains in the frontline of pastoral support for our community clients. The service will develop to work with the core leadership of the Voluntary Alliance across Devon, the Locality Implementation Groups and the PCNs to help create a seamless tapestry of support across professional and voluntary services.
The aim of the Community Chaplain role is to provide advice, guidance and leadership in the Local Implementation Groups; signpost staff and clients to spiritual, pastoral and community support close to home; and support clients directly within the local community. Chaplains are uniquely placed to be able to deliver for CMHF – built upon their years of experience developing relationships with community leaders, charities, different faith groups and community special interest groups.
Proposed Outcomes If our Pilot is successful we would anticipate being able to provide evidence that:
Where Chaplains have engaged with clients referred to them, the number of readmissions into our services might have been reduced. Colleagues in LITs, PCNs, and other frontline professionals are personally seeking the chaplains’ advice and expertise in supporting their clients and outreach initiatives. We receive increasing numbers of referrals of community clients to us for pastoral and spiritual support. We can evidence ways in which we have helped to embed clients into community support groups – be it of faith or other nonreligious, special interest groups. We have shared our findings with peer Chaplaincy Departments across the Country for critical inspection.
Best Practice
Supported Internship At Devon Partnership Trust Supported Internships have become a clear priority for the NHS in recent years. They are study programmes specifically aimed at young people aged 16 to 24, who have a statement of special educational needs, or an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), and who want to move into employment, but need extra support to do so.
The interns receive support from a job coach. As the interns develop their confidence, skills and knowledge, the job coach steps back gradually, as and when is appropriate to each individual.
Devon Partnership NHS Trust has had a Supported Internship programme in for three years. However, the impact of the pandemic prevented the Trust from placing interns, who were no longer actively engaged with their educational providers and weren’t able to come safely to sites easily.
By ‘thinking outside the box’ the Trust’s Corporate Affairs team developed a supported internship for an excellent candidate, enabling the placement to happen fully remotely. Working ‘online’ met the needs of both the intern who suffers from significant anxiety, particularly around travelling, and of the Trust who could not readily support an intern on a Trust clinical site.
The success of the internship catalysed the Trust’s ambition to swiftly develop the Supported Intern to ‘Supported’ Apprenticeship pathway, as it was quickly recognised that internships
do not have a seamless transition to further development and ultimately substantive employment. We felt uncomfortable to benefit from the skills and contributions of an intern, only to see their journey end after the unpaid placement.
Although seemingly a simple and obvious transition, the barriers that have been encountered to make this pathway a reality have been numerous and challenging; both internally and externally to the Trust. This leads us to be significantly concerned about how widespread the disadvantage for young people with additional needs is, preventing them from accessing further education and employment in a fair, equitable and accessible way.
Working through each barrier logically, making contact with countless education providers and unpicking a number of Trust procedures and practices, we are hopeful we are about to secure our very first supported intern, into a paid apprenticeship role with us.
We want to celebrate the amazing asset she is to our Trust. We are extremely proud of our intern, the skills and capabilities she has demonstrated to us, the patience she has exhibited and most significantly, her courage.
But most of all we want to thank her for just how much she has taught all the members of her team – about care, compassion, inclusivity, tenacity and breaking down barriers. We owe so much to her for opening our eyes, individually and collectively, to a wider world of possibilities.
We are now ambassadors to deliver change and to see our workforce evolve in the coming years with confident, valued and developed staff working throughout our services that have come through a supported internship journey.
