The Isle of Wight Youth Trust has announced that it is expanding its services to include group work, in an attempt to tackle the increasing demand for its one-to-one counselling service.
The move comes following over 1,000 young people reaching out to the Youth Trust for support last year, with many of them requiring longer-term support for complex emotional difficulties.
Youth Trust Chief Executive, Mairead Healy, says that the Youth Trust’s priority is to provide, timely and relevant support for young Islanders.
“Early intervention is vital and we want to make sure that our young Islanders can access support as quickly as possible, in order to achieve the best mental health outcomes. This has been the driving factor in setting up our new group programmes.
“We are currently running four group sessions each week, and have received overwhelmingly positive feedback so far. Based on the success of these groups, group work is becoming part of our core offer, as we look at new ways to best support young Islanders”.
Mairead adds:
“Over the past six-months, the Youth Trust has transformed the way we work. Following clear and strong feedback from our young people, we moved away from the six-session model in November last year, and now offer a much more flexible and individualised approach to counselling. We are proud of this new clinical model and firmly believe that this change was necessary to provide the best quality support to our young people.
“We prepared for the changes by moving to a new premises, which is 4.5 times the size of our previous headquarters, and have taken on more counsellors to try and keep up with growing demand. Despite our best efforts, the new clinical model has meant that counselling appointments do not become available as often and this, paired with a steep increase in demand has seen our waiting list increase”.
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Mairead said that the group programmes were an example of ongoing changes within the Youth Trust, which are led by the voice of young people in the Youth Trust’s Mental Health Taskforce.
“In expanding our services, we hope that young people can see that we are listening, we are responding, and we are working hard to get them the support they need and deserve. This is an ongoing challenge, but a challenge we meet with enthusiasm.”
