Why mental health needs to be made a priority in our children’s homes - Dr Nadia Khurram

In my role as the clinical lead at Timeout Children’s Homes, it is my responsibility to provide an integrated clinical pathway, from when children arrive in our care to the journey they take with us. We look after children from some of the toughest backgrounds, and their mental health is our priority as soon as we meet them.

For this reason, we use a multi-disciplinary team approach including an occupational therapist, a speech and language therapist and an art therapist to assess and meet the children’s needs.

Our aim is to try and understand the impact of their early adversities whilst also holding in mind the support that the children require with transitioning into care, exploring their new environment and people providing them with safe attuned care.

At times we have had to rely on statutory services to assess and support the children but often we are met with lengthy waiting lists that are another delay in the ‘system’ for these children. Therefore, having an in-house clinical team has helped reduce the reliance on external services.

We changed to provide this kind of immediate support in house as a direct result of the waiting lists for mental health support. They need immediate help and to be able to communicate what they have been through so we can understand exactly what kind of support they need on a daily basis. We have invested heavily in staff training from both the clinical teams, to the carers to ensure that the care we provide is in line with the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance.

Not all the children who attend our schools live in our care homes, some of them also attend on a daily basis, but may come from homes where additional support and help is also needed. We have therefore extended this service to cover both these children and their families too. All of this being preventative measures to help prevent those children being taken into care and to support the parents.

Basic things like working with an occupational therapist can help any child in a classroom, by adjusting their surroundings to benefit their learning. Make the classroom less visually overbearing, or simply ensure they have the right equipment that they need on their desk. Others may struggle articulating how they are feeling, because they don’t have the communication skills to be able to express themselves and thus a speech and language therapist can support them. Whilst they also work with a psychologist to consider how they may develop a language inclusive of their emotional well-being.

For this reason, we are aiming to help the wider community around us, and as a result we are launching Mind-U, a community backed service where both the children and families can have support. This extends from therapeutic parenting support, to mental health support in general.

All our clinicians work using evidence-based practice. By doing this, we are hoping to contribute to reducing some of the waiting lists for mental health support, and benefit some of the families who are waiting for help. Some of the longest waiting lists are for neurodivergent assessments, with children with both ADHD and Autism waiting prolonged periods for appointments and as a result support. This places huge pressures on families as well as the children and we hope we can play a part in helping some of these families in our community.

Our longer term goals as part of this project is to also work with schools and local authorities to train staff to help them understand why a child may be presenting in a certain way and what may be the cause using a psychological framework.

Closer to the homes, we also run a parent support group covering different topics and activities. Parenting is a skill. Help with topics like understanding neurodiversity, mental health conditions, and just sharing as part of a group supports the parents mental health too. We are all living in difficult times, so mental health needs to take priority as much as someone’s physical health. We are hoping that Mind-U can benefit people across our community and wider if possible.

All of this takes time and investment, but if we can support families in their homes and prevent more children coming into care, it has to be a positive thing to do. Using our vast skill set within the team, we can contribute to bringing some of these waiting lists down and help to support mental health.

Nadia Khurram is the clinical lead at Timeout Children's Homes.