 We are live. So actually, if we don't let to this 30 minute session in which we're going to be talking about the Wild Minds project. So really what the aim of this session is is for us to explain to you a bit about what Wild Minds actually is to talk to you about what happens at the group and also to tell you a little bit about the evaluation as well as the Wild Minds project. But I think most importantly to tell you about how you can refer to Wild Minds. If you have a young person that you're working with at the moment that you think might be appropriate or might be helped by this project. We want to just make it really clear how you can get in touch with us and how you can kind of connect. So that's the plan. Just before we get into the details, let me introduce myself. So my name is James Fairben. I'm a clinical psychologist by background. So I've worked mostly within the NHS in services for children and young people. And I now work in a place called the Anaphoid National Centre for Children and Families. And most of my experience is really working with young people with some more kind of difficult severe mental health difficulties in an inpatient and daypatient setting. But I was really lucky to be asked by Southcams to be involved in this project, which has been really lovely. It's been fantastic. So just want to hand over to Lea who's here as well just to say hello. Yeah, so morning everyone. I'm Lea. I work as the Health U coordinator for Southcams District Council. And we originally sort of set up the Wild Minds programme under the Let's Get Moving banner. I'm not sure if any of you ever heard of it. So we've just moved over to the Health U and it's working in partnership with James as the clinical psychologist for the programme and Milton Country Park who delivers the programme for us. So I do the sort of project management in the background, if you like. Thanks Lea. So Lea is going to be working the chat function today. So we'd really invite you just to ask questions. So if there's thoughts or questions or things that aren't clear, do just pop it into the chat and we'll do our best to answer. So we're going to, we'll probably stop along the way and just just to kind of check in on questions and try to answer some. We'll also keep a bit of time at the end as well. So we'll make sure we keep 10 minutes or so to kind of get into some chat discussion if there are things that feel important. Yeah, and then also James, if we missed, we're going to email out the sort of the questions and answers. If we don't answer your question now we'll send you the recording and the answers to questions. Yeah, and the copy of the slides. So we're going to share some slides and we'll send those out to your email addresses as well. Okay. Okay, so I'm just going to share my screen and then we'll start telling you a bit about, about Wild Minds. Can you see that right there? Can people see that? Great. Okay, so, so what is Wild Minds? What's it about? So this is, it's a group based project for young people. So 14 to 17 year olds with who are experiencing mental health difficulties. And there's a particular emphasis in this group on having contact with nature. So this is about being outdoors. It's about trying to build confidence, trying new things, but particularly being active and being in contact with nature. So, so things like learning new skills at bushcraft, yoga, survival skills, paddle boarding, things which many of the young people who've been along haven't, haven't done before. So as Lea said, this has been developed by South Cams Council and with Cambridge Sport Lakes Trust. And what happens is that there's, there's eight sessions that run for an hour and a half. And they're run by some really skilled instructors actually. So people have had a lot of experience in teaching some of these activities. And also youth workers who've had lots of experience in working with young people and young people with mental health difficulties to have experience in, in contact with, with young people with those kind of challenges. And I've been involved in the development of the project. So thinking about how we kind of run it and develop the sessions alongside supervising some of the team. And also some, some evaluations, just thinking a bit about how, how helpful it's been so far. So trying to learn about, learn from what the young people are telling us, but also learn from some, from some kind of outcome measures in terms of young people's wellbeing. Just to really quickly give you a little bit of the context of how did this develop? So, so why, why did world minds develop? And there's, so there's this real emphasis on kind of being active and kind of building confidence. But this particular project happened really in the context of how things have been in relation to the mental health of young people within, within the UK. And so one of the things that's become strikingly clear over a number of years, at least 10 years, probably going back a bit further. There's been a massive increase in the demand for mental health services from, from young people from families. So rates of referrals have increased dramatically over the last 10 years, but even, you know, even recently as well. So if we look, for example, in terms of NHS referral rate rates for mental health difficulties, if you compare 2016 October that month to October in 2019, there's almost a double of referral rates. And that's a picture that's kind of been happening nationally. So, so really there's, there's a number of reasons for that. And we could probably get into some discussion about why that is happening in our society. There's lots to think about, but actually we're not going to be able to do that today. I think one of the, one of the things that is clear though is that we need a change in how we think about mental health. So that actually in our society, what's becoming clear is that we're not going to be able to meet this demand and just by having kind of professional specialist mental health services alone. And the demand is kind of too high. And actually we need to be thinking in our communities about trying to provide a range of different forms of help and support that aren't just, you know, talking therapies, but that might really fit with the kind of needs of young people and provide a kind of a real choice, a range of different choices. But where there's a kind of an explicit focus, you know, that these are things which are around helping us to connect and helping us to support each other's mental health. So this idea fits a bit with this model called Thrive, which is a way of trying to bring together different forms of help for young people in terms of mental health and to have some kind of shared principles. So that's a little bit of the context for kind of how Wild Minds came about that it's really another option. We would see this as an extra kind of option, an additional form of help for young people who might not want to kind of engage with talking therapies or who might not meet the thresholds for going into a specialist service. So that's one of the kind of side effects again of this, this massive increase in referrals is that the wait times and the thresholds change to get access to those services. So Wild Minds has kind of been a bit of a response to that. And of course there's another context as well at the minute which is the pandemic that we're all very aware of and what's very, very apparent now is that there are some increases across across the population really in anxiety and depression, whether that lasts kind of after the pandemic and kind of going forward with that's less clear, but certainly through the kind of earlier stages of the lockdown. That's been found in the literature for young people and young people's anxiety and depression. What we've seen though is that there's been more of an impact on young people that already have some kind of vulnerability. So for young people with pre-existing mental health conditions, there's been a worsening that's generally our sense through the pandemic. So there's this kind of building evidence that actually there's probably been a bit of a disproportionate impact on those that maybe have kind of socioeconomic disadvantage or other disadvantages already. So we kind of need to be thinking about those groups. We need to be prioritising those groups as well when we're thinking about what other interventions or support could we offer. So Wild Minds kind of connects a little bit with this context too. And Wild Minds started actually, so although it was kind of developed, the idea was developed before the pandemic, it's actually been running through the pandemic. Okay. And I suppose just thinking a little bit about what we try to offer at Wild Minds that actually it connects with what we know can kind of buffer against the impact of the pandemic. And so being able to kind of maintain physical exercise, having access to being outdoors, social creative and cultural activities. So the literature is kind of suggesting these are the types of things that seem to kind of offer some resilience against the impact of the pandemic. And actually the things that we would emphasise at the Wild Minds group. So kind of perhaps suggesting that it's even more important to have these kind of opportunities at the minute. Okay, so just to say a little bit then about what, so what do the sessions actually provide, what goes on within the sessions at Wild Minds. So as we're saying, so eight sessions in the Milton Country Park, which is a really lovely environment for people that don't know it has lakes, it's really leafy, has lots of lovely walks. And so there's a focus on kind of learning a new skill. The session has a structure so that it's focused around doing an activity but there's space for young people also to kind of connect with each other to get to know each other and to join into some kind of collaborative activities as well where there's a bit less emphasis on them being led by instructors. So things that making fires. It's the idea is that this is a kind of safe environment. It's a supportive environment. There's not a focus on doing therapy or having to talk about difficulties. So what we wanted to it are senses that that we're trying to be kind of psychologically informed so that the staff are able to kind of listen to try to understand and make sense of what's going on for the young people who come to the group, but without any emphasis on young people having to kind of talk about their life or their stresses. And I think the staff would kind of try to help young people to kind of engage in things they've been encouraging and they helped to kind of problem solve. There's a signpost as well. So if there are other things that do come up that seem a bit more a bit more serious or that might need some further support them is that there's a kind of emphasis on connecting people to other help if they need to. One thing that we've been doing within the group is asking young people to set goals about what they want from coming to to wild minds. And the reason for this is that we what we find is that if young people come along with an idea about this and they've got a bit of a connection they want to get to some kind of focus and actually that that's shared as well with the instructors that it tends to lead to better outcomes and that kind of fits with what we know about other mental health treatments as well if you go into something with an idea about what you want out of it. And then it kind of you tend to kind of do a bit better than just going with no sense of what this is about. There's an emphasis as well in the sessions and trying to help young people to connect with each other that we would do some more kind of focused activities particularly when young when young people first start in the group to help them build relationships and get to know each other. And we found actually at the beginning when people come along and they're feeling a bit more anxious that actually having some more structure, some kind of games and activities to foster that is important. And then also after after Wild Minds is over there's there's an opportunity to continue coming to the park in a satellite club for those those young people that want to do that. So rather than just kind of ending those connections that young people have made. And we're trying to think about ways that they can continue for those that want that. Okay. So just a little bit more detail on who who's the kind of population that we're we're hoping to to help and support here. So young people 14 to 17. And we're not being specific we're not we're not kind of focused on any particular category or diagnosis of mental health difficulties. Really we welcome a range of presenting kind of problems so we expect that there'll be young people here that might have anxiety difficulties difficulties with mood and self esteem that they might be common features as well. And but yeah we're not we're not kind of being specific want to kind of keep this is quite broad. We're not accepting referrals from for young people that already have a kind of specialist mental health service that's involved with them. So like a cams team. And also young people who present with high risk to themselves or to others that we're not able to work with within the group. But those are kind of really the only exclusion criteria so we want to keep it as I say quite open. And I guess it's important to think about whether a young person can manage being in a group so have they got the capacity to kind of communicate and not feel kind of too anxious that just being in a group is unmanageable. And so that that would be something to consider too. Okay so just just spend a couple of minutes thinking about if if there is a young person that you've got in mind or you're thinking about other other young people you have contact within your work how do you how do you get in contact with us how do you refer. So the information is all online here at this web address. And we would I guess we would really encourage young people to self refer. So our hope is that young people can kind of come onto the website have a read about what Wild Minds is have a think about whether this might fit with them. Is this something that kind of connects with with what they might like or the kind of ways of getting help that might kind of fit for them. And then we would like them to be able to fill out the form themselves but if but if as a refer and you're you're kind of getting involved we just encourage you to sit down with a young person and kind of think through the form and talk about it with them kind of do it do it together jointly. I know that layer layers available if people would like to get in contact with her over email as well just to discuss referrals or to find out a bit more about maybe to think about I've got this young person in mind you think it would be appropriate. So those kind of informal conversations we'd really invite those as well. But once people do refer or self refer or you jointly refer we then set up a call. So the young person and their parent and care gets a call from us from layer probably. And we talk a bit more about the group explain a bit more about what happens and what it's like and really just decide together whether this is something that young person wants. And then if it is then we do a bit of this goal setting that I mentioned. And also the young person would complete some measures of their well-being. So this is a way of us just being able to kind of check in on on their progress. And we also talk a bit about confidentiality and information sharing at that point as well. And I'm just going to pause there because I've just gone through quite a bit of information quite quickly. I just want to check in to see if there's any any questions or people have have any thoughts. Or if there are any bits that aren't clear at the minute. Lea have we got any questions? Yeah, so we've got a question. Thrive there's a few programs with the same name is this Thrive program developed by Rob Kelly. Okay, no, so so Thrive so Thrive is a national initiative which is really a framework for kind of bringing together mental health services across different agencies. So it's really Thrive is a way of developing some kind of shared principles across lots of different types of mental health kind of care for young people. So it's really based on this this kind of idea that it's not just about kind of NHS services doing, you know, kind of therapy work with young people that actually in our communities there. There can be lots of different opportunities and ways for young people's mental health to be supported. And that if together we have a few kind of key shared principles so some some shared language, some shared ways of thinking about kind of what we do and how we begin and how we end with young people. So that's what we do what we offer, we base on young people's needs so what they're needing and actually choosing that actually that that's a kind of more helpful way of organizing services rather than kind of all going off offering slightly different things and sometimes in ways that aren't so clear. So that's really what Thrive is about. And so Thrive isn't a particular kind of service in itself it's more of a framework for organizing a range of services across our kind of communities. So fine, if you if you Google Thrive Thrive and a Freud Center you'll be able to read more about it. So why is the age range 14 to 17. Yeah, that's a good question. I think, I mean, I think we would we would consider running groups in the future with with different age ranges. I think our thinking was that 14 to 17 year olds that in terms of their capacity to connect and build relationships with each other that you'd have some 14 year olds who might be more mature and who might be able to kind of get on quite easily with you know 16 year olds and kind of vice versa you might have some 16 17 year olds who could, you know, make friends with 14 year olds 15 year olds, but a kind of outside of that age group it felt like it might be a bit more difficult for people to kind of connect relationships which is essentially one of the things that we really want to promote our wild minds. And then do we cover different skills each session. Yes, we do a variety of stuff. Also depending on the weather. If they're at the park at the session, they get on the water, whether they'd be doing bushcraft type stuff in the wild place there at the park and that answers that one and then there's geography effect referrals. Yeah, you might want to say a bit more about that one there in terms of the areas that we're. Yeah, so Southcams District Council supported program doesn't necessarily mean we're only taking referrals from the SEDC postcode so it would be more of a question if the young person can get to Milton Country Park would be the sort of answer there if yes then we would like to help them out. At the session so geography not necessarily a problem, but if they can get there is the biggest hurdle I'd say. Okay. And this is a good one James if someone is on the cam wait list for months does this mean they cannot access wild minds. Now we would, we would say that if you've been if you're on a waiting list, then we would. Yeah, we would accept you into wild minds. And I think as long as as long as the criteria that we just talked about were met and there weren't any concerns about kind of risk to safety. Which which my guess is if you're if you're on a waiting list for a long time then it might be that those risks aren't so high. I think we would, we would accept you. So we were saying for a young person who's already engaged with a worker. So perhaps doing a piece of therapy work. He maybe has a team that's involved with them that that wouldn't, we wouldn't be, we kind of asking them to join the group because because we're thinking a bit about resource and how we kind of reach young people that aren't accessing help. So the city and South Kams young people are able to refer East Kams. Yes, we do take these camps referrals as well. The other question here, dates of the group on the web page, can a young person start partway through the course. So, yes, the next date is the 6th of June. James, do you want to answer the second part of that? Yeah, we would say that because the group development is really important, whilst it's not a kind of therapy group per se that it still has a therapeutic aspect to it. And so a young person coming in say halfway through wouldn't wouldn't be so helpful. So we would, we would kind of join the group at the beginning. The group would kind of follow through. So, so I guess the answer that is no, we kind of, yeah, we want to form the group and help the group to kind of develop over the eight weeks. I think that can be there. Yeah, it can be difficult for a young person for them, and also for the other young people who are beginning to kind of feel safe and get to know each other. Yeah, so how many young people will be at the group? So recent, the first two cohorts have been around six or seven young people. We've normally had kind of one or two dropouts, which I think is kind of kind of expected for a group project, a group intervention. Yeah, we'd like to start with 10, don't we, James? No more than 10. And then there's a Wellminds poster in Suffolk. Is this accessible across the boundaries or at different referrals? We have some young people that live on the Suffolk border. Again, that's an interesting one. We would like to fill it with the Cambridgeshire county referrals. If we do have a space at the end, we would like to help out anybody who can access the program. So that would just be a case of being in touch with myself just before the program for that one. And then I think that is every question so far, James. Okay. Unless anybody's got any, any more. That's cool. So we just spend a couple of minutes just talking about some of the evaluation that we've done of the first two cohorts of Wellminds. So we had around about 11 or 12 young people involved in the first two groups. And we've been really interested in just trying to try to learn more about whether this is helpful, young people's experiences of being in the group. And also we've been interested in kind of tracking their emotional well-being. So comparing the beginning and the end of the group in terms of their well-being. And so just to say a little bit about that. So we had some aims really of this. We're thinking about it as a pilot for the first two cohorts. And this might sound, this might sound like not a particularly great aim to have, but actually we're thinking about we didn't want people to deteriorate when they joined the group. So we wanted to kind of make sure that young people's mental health wasn't getting worse. We're thinking about that because actually we know that sometimes when young people are on waiting this for a long time, some young people can can get worse if they're not receiving help. So thinking in the context of the pandemic as well, when there are a number of stresses on young people in terms of kind of social distancing and social isolation. So this was our kind of primary aim. And then our second James were thinking about actually in terms of emotional well-being, we would hope to see some kind of progress towards people's own goals that they'd set. And perhaps an improvement in their reports of emotional well-being after the group. And also to, as I was saying, to just shape and improve the project using the feedback that young people were giving us. And really, we went about that in some different ways. And we don't have a huge amount of data, of course, because there are only a few young people that were able to kind of complete these measures and there are small groups so far. But using the scale of emotional well-being called the WEMWebs, the Warrick Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale, which is a 14 item questionnaire that asks about well-being over the last two weeks. So kind of comparing young people's scores at the beginning and at the end of the group was quite encouraging actually. It showed us that a couple of young people in particular reported quite significant changes. So you can see here young person two and nine, some quite significant changes in their scores and how they were thinking about reporting their emotional well-being. Some young people reported being the same, which was kind of still quite encouraging in the context of everything that's going on at the minute in terms of the pandemic as well. And now the young people reported some kind of smaller, smaller shifts, some smaller kind of positive shifts. So we were quite encouraged by that. Certainly was that people weren't getting worse and people's experiences of the group was really positive was kind of what we were hearing. So these are examples of some of the goals that people were setting, some of the things that people wanted to kind of improve whilst they were spending time over the eight sessions at the Country Park. So things like to feel less anxious and to be a bit more relaxed, to build confidence in meeting new people and to help me to understand others more, to build new relationships. To build them around kind of relationships and kind of mood and anxiety. And overall, just to say I suppose about about the goals overall, most of the young people, we found that most young people reported in some progress towards their goals, at least one of their goals. And I think there was a kind of, there was an average improvement of a couple of points towards their, their kind of goals. So we asked people to rate where they felt they were at in relation to achieving their goal at the beginning and at the end. So we asked for qualitative feedback as well and that was really encouraging. Lots of many of the young people said that they felt very supported in the sessions and had a sense of kind of learning something. And importantly, just that they've been enjoying the session. So we asked them to rate that on a scale of one to five. The kind of dark green is very much light green number four kind of quite a bit. And you can see that most people said that, you know, they felt able to take part in the sessions. And here's just, here's just some of the themes of the qualitative responses that people gave us in terms of the things that they enjoyed the things that they took from the sessions. And the themes are really connected where we've kind of been feeling calm, so being able to kind of manage feelings. So a sense of, for example, being able to kind of breathe and relax, learning about learning about yoga, learning about calmness. A sense of learning some new skills, things that have to make fires and go canoeing. And also another theme of just that sense of being outdoors and in contact with nature. And so some nice, some nice feedback here. I'll just leave it out for a second. And I think, I think what was more challenging for us was often to get constructive kind of feedback from the young people. We found that often young people are really positive in their, the measures of experience that they were giving us. So we really had to work hard to kind of pull out, you know, what might we need to do differently? And I think we still need to think about that. We still need to develop some new ways of kind of building up more kind of constructive, constructive ideas from young people about how we could change things a bit. And this was certainly one bit of feedback that's been quite helpful. And actually when people first come to the group, they feel pretty anxious, as you might imagine, coming to a new group with people that you don't know, if you've got some pre-existing kind of worries about and anxiety. So actually that we could do with having some more structure at the beginning, some more kind of focus activities to help get to know each other and break the ice, which is something that we've been doing and working on. Okay. So, so what are the next steps now? We want to kind of publicize this. This is a free intervention project. We want to open referral pathways. So we're really inviting people to talk to us and get in contact around the young people that you might know or be working with. And we want to continue evaluating this and just think a bit more about is this helping? And if so, what are the aspects of it that are kind of more helpful and less helpful as well? So we're really interested in that. And then of course, as I mentioned that this extra opportunity at Milton Country Park for young people that have finished the group to be able to come back and kind of continue with an activity-based group in the future through the Satellite Club. But we've got a report that we've written on the initial evaluation. So please, when we send the slides out, if you're interested, go and have a read there. And there's a lot more detail about the kind of feedback that we've had from young people and the initial measures using the wellbeing questionnaires. So, Lea, that's, I'm just going to pause there again for a sec. Just coming towards the end, I know, but just wondering if there's any other questions or things that have come up that would be helpful. No, that's no more questions there. I guess, if you go to the South Cams District Council website, there's a section on Wildminds that's got more information, and you'll find the self-referral form there for any young people who you think might benefit from joining. And then I will get in touch personally with those referrals to sort of register them and have a quick chat with them about the programme, and we'll complete the WEMWebs and goal settings at that stage. And then they will hear from the pack, what they need to bring, where they need to go, and that kind of thing. So that's the process. And then the next cohort starts on the 6th of June. And then the following one after that is over the summer holidays, and then we aim to get one more in at the end of the year before Christmas. So there's another three, at least in Milton Country Park this year, if you like. If you get anything, please do get in touch with myself after this, or at any point, if you've got any questions. James, are you going? That's great. I think, so that's all of the slides that we had. So as we said, we'll send out the slides to people. And yeah, do you get in contact if you have any questions. I would also share with you a poster and a five handout that you can share. And for the young people, posters put up wherever you like. Do feel free to share with anybody you think that might be able to refer young people would be great. Okay. All right. Well, thank you everyone. And we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, James. Okay, thank you everyone. Bye bye.