Mental Health Awareness Week
Sarah Ball, Contracts Manager, specialising in mental health.
For this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week the theme is ‘anxiety’, and we’re encouraging our customers and colleagues to talk about how they feel and get help if they need it.
Dealing with anxiety
Anxiety is a normal emotion, but when it gets out of control and impacts our lives and the choices we make, it can become a mental health problem.
A quarter of adults report feeling so anxious, that at times it stops them doing things they want to do. You can find out more, and tool to overcome anxiety on the Mental Health Foundation’s website.
Our customer approach
At NCHA we deliver a number of care and support services that focus on and support people experiencing poor mental health. There is a full list of our mental health services on our Care and Support pages. Our services include care homes, supported housing, supported living, floating support and outreach services.
We also support a number of customers who live in our general needs housing, whose mental health may be impacting on their tenancy and wellbeing.
But our approach is less about what we do and more about how we do it.
We use a trauma informed approach to support our customers.
Trauma-informed approach looks beyond an individual’s presenting behaviours and asks, ‘What does this person need?’ rather than ‘What is wrong with this person?’
The six key principles of this approach are: safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment and cultural consideration.
Our Plan
This approach to mental health support and our plans to train more colleagues, forms part of our Mental Health Promise.
The document explores the key challenges we face in support delivery and sets key objectives to increase our mental health support offer over the next five years.
Our vision for mental health is: “Being the best we can be for our customers and colleagues by always listening and striving to improve, in an environment that is supportive, inclusive and wellbeing focused.”
