“Working with young people is my passion, and using new and innovative ways to engage young people with mental health issues makes my job even more interesting,” says CDW Simon Newitt, who is now based at Bristol PCT.

From 2005 to early 2008, Simon worked with the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in Plymouth. Working in a multi-disciplinary team led by a Senior Educational Psychologist and Primary Mental Health Workers, the KEW-5 project aimed to raise awareness of child mental health issues and to develop community-based pathways of care for children and families from BME communities in the area – the numbers of whom had increased significantly in the five years prior to the introduction of the project.

Since much of the city’s BME population could not yet be described in terms of communities the project began by focussing on establishing partnerships with voluntary and community sector organisations. The city is home to a growing number of asylum seekers and refugees from countries such as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea and the Congo as well as large numbers of East European migrants from Poland, the Czech Republic and Baltic States.  After a long process of engagement and credibility building, regular drop-in sessions were set up at the local Refugee Council offices to offer advice to refugee women about child development/health, housing, welfare and language development.

Similar relationships were developed with the local Traveller community and Muslim and Christian community organisations. The team worked flexibly, often on weekends and evenings and constantly reflected on their learning, treating the communities and service users as experts in their own needs, and acting as advocates to support them.  By focusing on a social model of mental health that recognised the child and family’s needs holistically, the team were able to combine their various skills and expertise to deliver an integrated service to the community that addressed housing, welfare, transport and immigration related issues. The partnerships developed across the voluntary and community sector eventually meant the team’s individual caseload of BME children stood at around 20% with the communities themselves beginning to self-refer to the team through word of mouth. Externally evaluated by the Department of Health, the KEW-5 project was characterised by consistently high satisfaction scores among its users.

Simon recalls one family that benefited greatly from the service: “We worked with a refugee family from the Congo, focusing on a three year old girl who was incredibly withdrawn following her family’s detention and threat of deportation from the UK. She was absorbing anxiety from her parents who were understandably worried about their future.

“We worked with the parents to communicate how their stress affects how their children feel and behave, while signposting them to support services. We placed the girl with a local nursery, provided her with a ‘buddy’, worked closely with the staff and made the environment as comforting as possible. Eventually the nursery became a sanctuary for her and she blossomed, developing her language skills and building up her resilience to difficulties which would have previously compounded her anxiety.”

Also in partnership with the Refugee Council, Simon co-ordinated a University of Central Lancashire community engagement project exploring the mental health needs of asylum seeking and refugee women, children and young people.

Simon says, “We recruited seven women who had sought or were seeking asylum and trained them in research skills. The women then conducted 50 one-to-one interviews with other women and focus groups with teenagers in their communities on mental health and well-being. The project was a great way of building capacity amongst an otherwise marginalised group - but more than this it felt like a mental health intervention itself as the research team developed into an incredibly strong support group that pulled one another through the experiences of detention, depression, destitution and positive/negative asylum applications. It was humbling to see the women respond and bond in this way. One of the researchers has gone on to take over my role as a CDW.”

Now Simon is looking forward to getting involved in a new project in Bristol, working with dual heritage children to build up pride and self-esteem around their cultural identity. He says, “I’m excited about the next chapter; working with children to boost self-image and pride will be a challenge but a brilliant opportunity to transform ideas around self-image and mental health, which I see as at the heart of many of the issues facing these young people.”