This is a report of our activity in the 12 months from October 2006.
Every month we have held a monthly open meeting and a management committee meeting. We have mailed out notes to our membership every month. I thank everyone who has been involved with the organisation of the Forum, especially Graham Harrison who stepped in as Acting Secretary at very short notice when the elected member could not continue. We value the time and effort Graham puts into organising each monthly mailout and also the accounts. I hope in the next 12 months that other people will start to step forward to share these tasks.
We held a monthly meeting every month and had speakers including:
5 Boroughs Chair, Foundation trust, social inclusion team (July)
two events for Change for the Better (March, October)
PCT Mental Health Promotions (January, September)
Consultation event for mental health promotion strategy (February)
Local authority Rob Vickers (April, June)
Forum social – December, mid year discussion – May
Our focus this year has been on growing the membership and providing a wider variety of opportunities for people to contact us.
We succeeded in a funding application to Awards for All to fund a drop in group with Together. This eventually started in June 2007 and is held weekly. This group has grown with a regular attendance. Members have organised their own quizzes, refreshments and bingo. They organised a Halloween party and a tasting session where they taste tested cheaper basic brands against pricier alternatives. Thank you to Together and particularly Lesley and the volunteers for making a huge success of this group.
In October 2006, we held events for World Mental Health Day. We held a vigil at the United Reformed Church. We were involved in an event at the Crownway Community Centre organised by CDP and St Helens Chamber. We organised an evening event for young people including young carers with Barnardo’s 4F centre and invited the young people’s mental health service. We organised the promotion of all events in the local media. All these events were done with minimal funding – we thank the PCT and St Helens Council for their contributions.
We held the aware!!! events in March with our funding from the Council. These were a day of workshops showcasing artistic and creative activities and an evening event at the Citadel to promote mental health awareness to a younger audience. We received positive feedback from everyone who attended the two events, including Cllr Suzanne Knight and the leader of the Council, Cllr Brian Spencer. We thank everyone who was involved including the dual diagnosis group for performing their play.
We asked the PCT for a support worker last October. Eventually Jayne Woods from Mind was allocated to us in March. Jayne was a great help with the aware!!! events. She also attended groups on our behalf and began to promote the Forum throughout the Borough. Jayne has now left Mind for a new role. This post will be readvertised in the near future. Thank you to Mind and Jayne Wood.
We built on our promotion of World Mental Health Day and our aware!!! events by developing the hedstrong events for WMH Day 2007. We thank the PCT for agreeing to take on and fund hedstrong and hope that this will grow to be an annual event in St Helens.
We are in the process of developing our website at www.stehelensmhforum.org. We thank Jim for his support and efforts.
We worked with Mark Jory of Helena Housing on a funding application for a Wellbeing Officer to work with their tenants. This post should start early in 2008.
We hope that all these efforts will continue and that our group and membership will continue to grow.
We have been involved in two major pieces of work for other agencies – the mental health promotions strategy and Change for the Better.
The PCT’s strategy should provide a way forward for getting a wide range of stakeholders involved in promoting positive mental health. We congratulate all involved with this major piece of work and look forward to seeing the report back of the results of improvements to mental health in St Helens.
Change for the Better has already given us an inpatients unit in St Helens for the first time in many years. The new St Helens Hope and Recovery Centre shows a new way forward of working with service users to promote their positive mental health. Roman Babij represented the Forum at the opening event for the Centre, when it was formally opened by Ivan Lewis MP. We congratulate 5 Boroughs for their work on this building and hope to see further improvements to services in the next year. We thank them also for encouraging and facilitating our involvement.
Our representatives have also attended various meetings including the Partnership Board, the acute care forum and the local delivery team meetings for Change for the Better. We thank Roman Babij, Joe Platt and Steve Oldfield for representing our views.
The next year will see further changes in services including the development of the Links (Local involvement networks) and practice based commissioning. We are lucky to have Roman Babij who, both individually and as a forum representative, can keep us involved and informed on these changes.
We would like to ensure that the Monday group can continue past the current funding from Awards for All. We have enjoyed working with Together and value their emphasis on sustaining user led groups. We hope to learn from them in continuing our own group.
Another priority for the year ahead has to be tackling stigma. We have been very disappointed to see some of the local reporting in recent months about a variety of incidents. We hope to work with Alison Brooke and the self help groups to challenge stigma in the media.
We’d like to thank everyone who has supported the Forum in the last 12 months and hope we can build on that support for the year ahead.
Karen Machin
Chair
