Niche In-Brief Spring 2018 - Flipbook - Page 11
A Visyon for the future
Chrissie Cooke, Visyon Chairman
In 1994 three young friends tragically killed themselves in
Congleton, Cheshire. Devastated parents and friends
came together so that young people would, going
forward, have access to someone to talk to. Over 20
years later Visyon has 40 staff and more than 50 trained
volunteers, delivering therapeutic interventions to
hundreds of children and young people who present with
a range of issues, of which the most prevalent are: anger
management, stress/anxiety, and managing relationships
with family.
All of this potentially taking time and resources away
from the very children and young people that we are
trying to support; it is, unfortunately, a diminishing
cycle of return. Our lack of capacity means that we
regularly have to turn parents and young people away,
thereby increasing risks to them and to our services.
Often, we have relied upon our staff and volunteers
going above and beyond the call of duty to manage
these daily risks; risks which our Board finally decided,
were intolerable.
In 2014 our five-year strategy was to make sure we could
deliver our high-quality interventions to as many young
people as possible and we started to secure work from
NHS and social care commissioners, through competitive
tenders. However, this led us down a challenging road as
demand for referrals quickly began to outstrip our ability
to supply support within the funding available. We were
seeing increasingly desperate GPs sending increasingly
desperate parents and young children to our services
when they were really in need of substantive secondary
and tertiary healthcare.
In light of this, as a charity we have now had a radical
re-think about where and how we can best help the
parents and young-people that we support. We have
decided to stop providing NHS and social care
statutory services and will no longer provide intensive
therapy for children and young people who should be
seeing CAMHS; reverting to our original scope of
‘additionality’ to the current portfolio of NHS services.
Our waiting list began to increase and we were forced to
introduce more stringent screening programmes, which
resulted in Visyon having to turn away many parents and
young people who were in need. At times, even up until
fairly recently, we have had to close our waiting lists
when waiting times have exceeded what we deem to be
within, safe limits.
What is clear, is that the demand for services, particularly
early intervention for children and young people, is
unabating and not due to reduce any time soon. This
pressure needs a plan. Whilst the charity and not-forprofit sector provides vitally important services, they
should not be used to mask the creaking and vastly
underfunded health and social-care provision for child
and adolescent mental health.
The introduction of the NHS short form contract for all
NHS commissioned services added more pressure to our
existing governance systems; this is a sizeable issue for
small charities who do not have the infrastructure to
deliver these requirements long-term. The requirements
to manage increasingly severe risks, significant
safeguarding issues, record-keeping, information
governance and advanced staff supervision/training all
demand a significant managerial infrastructure.
Our strategy will now be focussed upon adding value
through our early intervention community-based
services in schools and with families. We are going to
focus on creating emotionally healthy environments for
children and young people to thrive in. We are going to
act as a navigator for children and young people and
their families in their quest for services that they are
entitled to, and act as an advocate. Within this
advocacy role we will develop campaigns that draw
attention to the need for improved children and young
people’s mental health services nationally. Importantly,
we want to see the services that children and young
people deserve, being delivered in a responsive way,
through the correct channels which have a risk-based
infrastructure which is able to cope with the volume of
referrals needed.
11