EVERYTHING THAT WENT INTO CREATING A SERVICE USER APPROVED MENTAL HEALTH STRATEGY | IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”

Andrew Carnegie

In 2021, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) conducted a mental health themed review in acute settings. From this review, CQC made three massive recommendations: that mental health care in acute settings should meet nationally recognised standards and that acute staff should have the training to feel confident in meeting mental health needs as well as being able to support their own wellbeing. Then, the third recommendation was that acute Trusts should have a Mental Health Strategy that has board level oversight and clear governance over administration and monitoring of the Mental Health Act. And so, NUTH set about creating a Trust-wide Mental Health Strategy, and almost immediately, they knew that including service users would be incredibly useful to the creation of the Strategy. I was honoured to be chosen to be in the ‘Expert Refence Group.’ This collaboration post will celebrate today’s official, internal launch of their Strategy by sharing my thoughts on all the steps NUTH staff have taken to ensure that it is service user approved. I do this, with the sincere hope that the Trust’s service user approved Mental Health Strategy will inspire others to adopt a similar approach in their Strategy creation processes as well as perhaps developing ideas to take even more action around mental health within their own organisation…

“YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE” | WHY TEAMWORK IS SO IMPORTANT IN MENTAL HEALTH | IN COLLABORATION WITH LIVERPOOL FOOTBALL CLUB | AD

So, the other day was special for two reasons, firstly; it was Time To Talk Day (you can read my post about it here) and second, it was my Mum’s Birthday!



After deciding that we should have a day out somewhere, we finally decided on Liverpool because Mum has always supported Liverpool Football Club (you can leave your hate and trolling here, it isn’t welcome on this blog!) and has never visited their Stadium; Anfield. So we booked some first class train tickets with Transpennine Express (who we weren’t particularly impressed by) to travel down early in the morning, and requested tickets for the Anfield Stadium tour later in the afternoon.

A BEHIND-THE-SCENES OF COLLABORATIONS | CATS PROTECTION, NORTHUMBRIA POLICE, CNTW NHS FOUNDATION TRUST, OLIVER BONAS, BANDANA BOWTIQUE, RICHMOND FELLOWSHIP, LNER & MORE!!

In light of the success of my article for the Cats Protection blog about the benefits to my mental health having a cat has had, I thought it might be a good time to talk a bit about what it’s like to collaborate with organizations/charities/companies and why I do it.

There are a few controversial issues in the blogging industry such as whether or not to monopolize your blog and feature ads, if you should make your blog into a ‘brand’ and whether you should collaborate with others on joint projects and partnerships.


I guess I decided to do collaborations pretty early on in my blogging career and had a guest blog feature on Time To Change’s website within months of beginning I’m NOT Disordered. I made the decision to work with the brilliant organization who primarily campaign to eradicate the stigma against mental health quite easily. I had been enjoying writing/blogging and found it a huge relief to have somewhere to vent and offload all my pent-up thoughts and feelings that were magnetized by being in a psychiatric hospital. So, it just seemed to make sense to also write a piece for such a huge, well-known, and influential organization like Time To Change. Seeing my number of readers grow after the collaboration was very rewarding and realizing that working with more established organizations would shed some light on the existence of my brand new, little, unknown blog led to more and more collaborations.