Embracing the ASSiST team

ASSIST is East Berkshire’s antidote to harmful, degrading and dehumainsing hospital admission – see the recent blog with one of our members telling how the process of being admitted to the mental health services made him feel like nothing more than a number.

EMBRACE is a novel ‘micro’ therapeutic community that meets together for only 2½ hours per week but ties together a whole week of individually tailored and co-created therapeutic services – in all the relevant sectors – NHS, social services, voluntary, social enterprises and charities.

Just coming up to our second birthday for the two projects we were delighted to be shortlisted for the BHFT (the NHS hospital and community provider organisation that manages us) ‘best patient initiative’ award …and even more delighted to win it!

So while I was trying to get to sleep after an evening of Italian food, music and fun (see the previous blog), texts and WhatsApps kept pinging me awake.

The team looked fabulous – well done them. A great deal of hard ‘governance’ work behind the scenes is needed to keep a project like this on track – ensuring all the tedious risk documentation and excruciatingly pedantic policies and procedures are followed, for example – to make it look calm and easy!

Maybe this means the ugly duckling (of a disfavoured TC) has become a swan – but it’s still paddling furiously under the water…