What I do: Simon Clark
Leading an early intervention in psychosis team and supporting commissioners and providers to plan for and implement the new early intervention in psychosis standard.
Looking back on my 25 year career in mental health care, starting as a nursing assistant on a ward in a Victorian era asylum to my current position as the manager of an Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP) service in Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust, it is heartening to see that attitudes and approaches to caring for those with mental health needs has moved forward. Arguably though, we still have some way to go in terms of reducing stigma, increasing understanding and offering rapid access to appropriate evidence-based treatments.
Since April 2016, we have seen the first ever mental health standard for reducing waiting times and improving access to mental health services for people who have experienced a first episode of psychosis: a condition that typically starts in early adulthood and can have life-long effects.
As this standard is directly related to the service I manage, and describes a pathway lasting two weeks or less; it can be a considerable challenge to ensure that my team and I do all we can to complete assessments, accept cases and begin working with individuals and their families.
In addition to being responsible for implementing the mental health standard, I have been fortunate to have been seconded for two days a week for the past year to the London EIP programme, set up to support providers and commissioners of EIP services in London with their own plans to improve access and reducing waiting times to mental health services. This role has taken me across London, as a clinical expert although I have taken away so much more from these visits than I could ever have expected. These opportunities to keep learning and developing as a professional and an individual have been one of the delights of my years in nursing and management.
Away from my travels, my day-to-day work primarily involves overseeing a team of very dedicated health and social care staff, running, monitoring and reporting on the performance of the service and happily, still in a position to work clinically as a mental health nurse. With my own caseload, I work with service users and their families through periods of remission and relapse, with the overall aim of a complete recovery and moving on from mental health services entirely.
This week I will be saying good bye to a service user I have worked with for the past four years, seen through periods of difficulty and great successes. We have worked closely together to find the correct treatment, secured a personal budget that he is able to use for those activities that mean the most to his wellbeing and he has now re-engaged with his family from whom he was estranged for many years. It is with great joy that we will be parting ways after being on this journey together.
The past year has presented many great opportunities for my career including some great contacts and friendships, but it has also been exhausting at times. Keeping on top of two demanding roles has meant working long hours; sometimes late into the night and weekends. Although this can be tiring, I count myself very lucky to be in such a position that in one day I can be working with a service user and their family to plan care and treatment and setting goals to look forward to their recovery, to dashing off to meet with commissioners of mental health services to offer views about what the services will look like in the years ahead.
One of the legacies of my work over the past year ‘starring’ in a short online animated video, intended to inform mental health staff about the new standard. Whatever the future holds, I am reassured that my avatar is doing a good job and will always look as young as it does now.
