I was really chuffed to hear that the Miscarriage Association learning materia
ls for health professionals were given a 5* review in the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ journal The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (TOG). I did a lot of work on these resources and it’s brilliant to get such positive feedback. Can’t say it better than Kath Evans from NHS England who partially funded the resources…
Sorry about the picture…noone wants Trump on their blog…
I coordinated the development of these resources, working with the National Director of the Miscarriage Association, the Media Trust and lots of service users and health professionals. Mary Higgins describes them as strong, powerful, upsetting and thought provoking with important learning points. I’m pretty pleased with that.
The resources are online now although we’re not launching them officially until the new Miscarriage Association website is live. But it’s great to see that health professionals are finding them useful already.
There are six films – one each for ambulance crews, A&E staff, GPs and booking in staff supporting women with pregnancy loss and two for anyone talking to women about management of miscarriage and what happens to the remains of their baby. Each one is accompanied by a good practice guide.
Last week I ran a session on community moderation for OCDAction.
Unlike my session for Leeds Mind (which was for community managers and focused on developing a moderation strategy) this session was for moderators themselves.
OCDAction have an established community but they want to expand their moderator team and make sure their current moderation practices are as effective as possible. They planned to use this session to help their first group of volunteers get started. Learning would also feed into new guidelines and support for future moderators.
We started with an overview of the strengths and limitations of online support and the nature of community moderation. We spent the majority of the session identifying and exploring the main skills that moderators might need and practising applying them to example cases. We looked at:
Every community I’ve worked on has been set up slightly differently
This week I travelled up to Leeds to run a workshop I called ‘An introduction to moderating online communities’.
It was attended by three groups associated with Leeds Mind. All of them were thinking about online peer support. Some had a platform built and in testing. Others were still figuring out what, if anything, they wanted to offer. The session was designed to give a basic overview of those important questions and decisions that anyone setting up an online peer support community should consider. We also explored the benefits and risks of some of the options available and started to think about the needs of specific communities.
“It was a very thorough, well-paced and thoughtfully structured workshop. A great introduction to the topic providing plenty of points to consider” Zoe Ward, Senior Commuications Officer, NHS Leeds South and East CCG
I started the presentation by posing a list of key questions which we considered throughout the session. I thought I’d pose them here too.
These are questions you should be asking people from the very beginning. Without it you risk making expensive mistakes and creating products people don’t want or need. Talk to people. Test your assumptions. Don’t just ask what people want. Ask why they want it and then consider different options for solving that problem. Create something small and test it out. Keep on asking, reviewing and making changes – what people say and what they do in practice can be quite different.
Next we went back to basics and defined our terms. Moderation, safeguarding, peer support, engagement – these can sometimes mean different things to different people. We can’t make useful decisions until we’re all talking about the same thing.
In defining community moderation we came up with a number of different types (including pre and post moderation) and a number of different roles that a moderator could have (including ‘policing’, providing support and facilitating peer support). We discussed what these might look like in practice.
Continue reading
“I’ll always remember the first time I met a ‘PP lady’. It was a very special day.”
“I had lots of friends who were mums but none of them understood what I was going through. I felt weird, lonely and isolated. When I found the forum I was like ‘Oh my god. People understand.”
Last Saturday I was invited back to run a third online peer support training session for Action on Postpartum Psychosis’ peer supporters.
Every year it is a moving and inspirational day (you can read about what we covered here). As I listened to the co-ordinators speak to new volunteers I was struck once again by just how important their peer support programme is.
In fact I think their services are a really good example of the life changing benefits that online peer support can provide. Peer support can be valuable for everyone but it is absolutely vital for APP.
Research by APP shows that women desperately want to meet other people who have been 
through PP, to share symptoms and have time to talk. Partners said the same.
Everyone needs to share stories, to be accepted and understood – especially if you’re going through or recovering from severe mental illness. Unfortunately, because PP is relatively rare, friends and family don’t know what is is or what it feels like. There is unlikely to be someone living near you who has been there. Some people may be scared to speak about their experience for fear of stigma and misunderstanding. For most women the APP Peer Supporter training sessions are the first time they have been in the same room as someone who has also experienced PP.
APP’s forums provide that link. They connect people with hundreds of others who can support them. When someone signs up for APP’s one-to-one email support service they are actively matched with someone who has had a similar experience. The chances of finding that offline are very very small.
Continue reading
Last night I ran an online training session for YouthNet’s chat moderator volunteers (I’ve written a post about what is is like to moderate real time support chat for young people here). We all joined a chat room in YouthNet’s online volunteer community for an evening session.
The focus of this chat was talking therapies – learning more about them and sharing knowledge as well as discussing how they might come up in support chats and what we, as moderators, can do to make sure the young people who come to the session get the right information.
Using a chat room for training sessions enables you to have more real time discussion. It 
brings everyone involved in a project or role together at the same time. It’s particularly useful if those being trained are spread out around the country. Some of the things I’ve learnt from running online training chats include: Continue reading
I was really pleased to be asked to help out with APP’s new online peer support programme.
APP has been funded to provide peer support to women with postpartum psychosis and their partners. They have been running an online forum for over a year and are now looking to expand their offering to one to one email peer support. Women with lived experience of PP will be trained to offer email support to women who are in the early stages of recovery.
One of the real benefits of online peer support is the fact that people are able to find, connect and talk to people with experiences similar to theirs from all over the country, or indeed the world. It’s reassuring to find out you are not alone and helpful to hear how others coped in similar situations.
This is particularly relevant with postpartum psychosis. Many women may not know anyone else in their area that has experienced it. Often, even if there were someone, that person may not feel comfortable talking openly about it. This service will enable women to find support and reassurance from someone who knows what they are going through.
It also sounds as though many men whose partners get PP have no idea where to turn. They often try and support their partner in hospital alongside holding down their job and caring for other children. They often feel they need to be the ‘strong’ one – and disregard their own emotional needs. While the one to one support is not yet available to them; partners looking for support regularly use the forum.
Like the Elefriends mental health community meet up, there was a lot of peer support in the training room. Unlike the Elefriends meet up, many of these women had never met someone who had experienced PP face to face before. This gave the whole day a really moving and inspirational feel. Continue reading
Personally I am interested in exploring ways of helping me manage my wellbeing as I try to cut 
down on the anti depressants I have been on for the last 12 years (a process that seems to have stalled around the 20mg mark). I’ve also recently been exploring the concept of happiness and what we mean when we talk about it.
Professionally I led on the exploration and implementation of online learning within YouthNet. This means I am interested in how simple online activities can help our young users make the most of the information and expert knowledge we have available and really embed positive skills and actions in their lives. After being sent the link by a blogging friend (thanks Lauren) I decided to sign up to Happify and see what it had to offer. Continue reading
Do you ever start something new and find yourself thinking ‘I should have been doing this for ages’? I had a very strong case of that this week as I began a new Coursera course called ‘E Learning and Digital Cultures‘ online.
Last year I watched a fascinating TED talk by Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera. I could identify with a lot of the learnings she spoke about. They were similar to conclusions I had reached from the initial forays into e learning I had been making at YouthNet using Moodle. These included ideas around the improved experience online learning can provide (particularly for a range of differently abled and variably focused students), the importance of a community of learners and the potential of using peer grading to scale feedback. I wrote a blog post about these ideas and how we had been putting them into action when developing our online training in support skills at YouthNet. But at the time I didn’t explore the possibility of doing a Coursera course myself.
I’m lucky to have had really inspiring colleagues – and in this case it was Helen Williams (@nellsberry – also blogging about the course) who told me about this particular Coursera course. It sounded enormously interesting and relevant so I leapt on board as well. And luckily, with Coursera, it’s pretty easy to leap on board. The course is a MOOC (standing for Massive Open Online Course) which means there are literally thousands of participants. While it opens and closes at a particular time and there are deadlines for our final assignment, individuals all over the world can choose when they read, watch and comment on the weekly papers, articles and films. Continue reading
After a recent dinnertime debate was resolved using the internet, a friend of mine said wistfully
“Sometimes I just speculate indefinitely for old times’ sake”.
I expect that this is a sentiment that we all recognise – the way we approach what we don’t know and the way we develop our knowledge is changing.
This is a question I have not only been asking new YouthNet volunteers but also in meetings 
within the organisation. Initially the answer is often “erm, I haven’t had much”. But who hasn’t looked up an answer to a question on Google, or Wikipedia – or found a video on Youtube to show you how to reset your phone, cast on in knitting, or even get the info needed to help your child with their homework?
We use the web to research and learn without even thinking about it now. For the younger generation it’s expected and deeply embedded in much of the curriculum. Using the web to facilitate learning and training within YouthNet has been something I’ve been exploring over the last year or so. I’ve been developing online courses for YouthNet volunteers and for participants in a country wide Money Skills programme. Continue reading