Behind the Scenes: Annual Review 2021 – 2022

Alongside the service delivery there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes and this was the year of finding our way back to the new hybrid way of working, but without knowing exactly how things would work out.

We had the phased return of working in the office but things did not return to how they were. Now the people who use our services were asking for different ways to engage with us, by phone, online and face-to-face. This blended delivery model meant we needed to develop new systems, policies and procedures.

It was also the year of the Mind Quality Mark audit and after a process extended due to lockdowns, we got over the finishing line. We won two awards, the Mind Excellence Award under the heading of People for our values-led approach to recruitment, and we went on to win the overall award for all categories.

We made a real investment this year in the development of our data management system, with an in-house Data Services Officer. This enabled us to make the most of our data, providing reporting for monitoring and evaluation of the services we are delivering. This has helped us deliver on our strategic aims on governance, and has given project managers an important tool for identifying areas to grow and develop.

And as a new member of the team one of the first projects our new Data Services Officer worked on was developing the system for managing the CYP Counselling team’s workload. Even with system development relationships are important. We focused on taking existing forms for referrals, assessments and counselling sessions, and linking them so that the process can be managed entirely online.

A long and involved process, Craig promised not to bore us with too many details.

“Key to it all was meeting the team in-person one morning in October, as lockdown eased. I demonstrated the pages I’d built and got immediate feedback. The team showed me where I’d misinterpreted their needs and told me about features they needed that I’d missed. Being able to learn from them directly what a Trauma Informed approach means in practice (being able to stop an assessment session and pick it up at a later date, for example) was invaluable to creating the system we ended up with.

The result of this work? 3 filing cabinets in the office are now empty because the paperwork they were filled with is now captured and stored online. The power of understanding what we all need!”