Developing peer support for families bereaved by postpartum psychosis On 23rd June 2024, I led APP’s first training day for bereavement peer support volunteers at the Barberry National Centre for Mental Health in Birmingham. We were joined by five new volunteers who want to use their experiences to help support other families who have lost family…
It’s a startling fact. Most people I’ve trained, or spoken to, during my work with the Luna Foundation assume that young people bereaved as teenagers are at a greater risk. We’ve certainly seen situations where the focus is on supporting older bereaved children and really just ensuring the basic needs of the younger child are…
I’m very pleased to report that Luna Foundation’s project in Kent and Medway has been highly commended in the Kent Mental Wellbeing Awards. The panel was ‘extremely impressed’ at the work Luna has delivered in Kent and Medway to improve the support for children and young people bereaved by suicide and ‘the amount of hard…
Open session taking place on March 1st The first of what I hope will be many of the new Miscarriage Association workplace training sessions are now available to book online here. These have been in development for a while now and are based on the research and resource development I did in 2019. Sessions to…
Miscarriage and the workplace resources In 2019 I researched and wrote a hub of resources for the Miscarriage Association on miscarriage and the workplace. I also recorded a podcast at a Women at Work event in Cambridge and represented the Miscarriage Association at a cross-government working group. The Pregnancy Loss Pledge Since then, the Miscarriage…
I recently worked with Hemihelp (now part of Contact) to help them with training for volunteer Facebook group moderators for their peer support group on the platform. The group was established in 2007 and became more active in 2011. It has over 5,000 members and over 11,000 interactions each month. It seems to be a…
I have recently licensed my community moderation training package to Cardiff Women’s Aid. As part of this three-year licence, they received an initial training session and feedback on participants practice activities, bespoke training resources and trainer’s notes, a train the trainer Skype session and a draft moderation handbook for their ongoing use. I have also…
Highly commended I’m really pleased that the films I helped research and develop as part of the Miscarriage Association’s new learning resources for health professionals have just received a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Drama category of the EVCOM awards. These resources have been well received by health professionals too – they were given a 5* review in The…
Learning materials for health professionals I was really chuffed to hear that the Miscarriage Association learning materials 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…
Skimming through the British Medical Journal, I came across a blog called Breaking bad news in maternity care. It’s a lovely piece about the new learning resources I worked on with the Miscarriage Association. I coordinated the development of these resources, working with the National Director of the Miscarriage Association, the Media Trust and lots of…
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…
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…
“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…
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…