PPN North West Blog

Dr Miranda Budd, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Clinical Lead for TAPPs.

Authors:

Across Lancashire and South Cumbria, 24 Trainee Associate Psychological Practitioners (TAPPs), at a band 4 level, have been recruited to general practice and community settings to deliver a mental health prevention and promotion service. Once qualified, they drop the ‘T’ and become APPs, at a band 5 level. Some of the TAPPs are based within one or two GP practices and some are spreading the service they provide across a whole primary care network (PCN), which in one case means up to 10 practices.

Medication prescribed by GPs for emotional difficulties is increasing at what is, perhaps, an alarming rate. One in three GP appointments has a mental health component to it and the reported rate of psychological need has increased as a result of the covid-19 pandemic and associated restrictions. With statistics such as these now well known, I think it’s time that psychological professionals focus their attention upon general practice and community settings. Your local GP, close by, familiar, lacking the stigma and sometimes complex access associated with mental health services seems an ideal place to start. With the average GP offering 10-minute appointments, and many GPs saying they don’t feel appropriately skilled to work with mental health and it’s varying presentations, it’s perhaps not surprising that ‘watchful waiting’ or a medication prescription are two overused tools.

Brendan J Dunlop, Clinical Psychologist in training

Health psychology is a rapidly growing discipline with increasing opportunities and career pathways. However, for trainees and prospective students it can sometimes be difficult to envisage what a future career in health psychology might look like. It’s not always easy to find examples of health psychologists working in areas outside of your respective work environment, or to fully understand the variety of contexts in which health psychology could be applied. Similarly, for organisations interested in commissioning health psychology expertise, it can also be challenging to find examples of the different settings in which we work, or to understand what we might bring to the table.

Mental Health Awareness Week 2021 has a theme of connecting of nature.  As we approach the end of Mental Health Awareness Week this year, I hope there’s been a time for all of us to connect with nature in some way. 

As we move into spring and a world with less lockdown restrictions, I wonder how many of us have mixed emotions about our new world.  Perhaps it’s been like the weather (at least here in the North West) where we have had hail showers followed by brilliant sunshine over the past few weeks.

Prof Lucie Byrne-Davis PhD CPsychol PFHEA FEHPS, Health Psychologist, Division of Medical Education,  School of Medical Sciences, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, The University of Manchester

Foreword by Gita Bhutani, PPN North West Chair

Saiqa Naz: CBT Therapist, Sheffield Specialist Psychotherapy Service, Co-author IAPT BAME Positive Practice Guide, & Chair, BABCP Equality and Culture Special Interest Group)

It’s an unfamiliar place and time we live in now.  Probably very few of us have a plan or script for how we cope with this situation and the potential future.   I’m sure most of us have found it unsettling to stop doing the things we take for granted in our lives.  These may be the chores that we’re not so keen on – grocery shopping, paying bills or the activities we enjoy – films, live entertainment, eating out, exercising, socialising.   For the former, we still have to do them but find different ways of doing them and the same is true of the latter.  Online platforms are available but acoustics and connectivity may be a challenge.

Dear all,

This week I've been to Bristol for the launch of PPN in the South West.   This is the result of the hard work by Catherine Gallup, Ken Laidlaw and Phil Self who have secured funding to develop the South West Psychological Professions Network. 

The Psychological Professions into Action have started the online workshop for us all to share our thoughts and ideas. 

The national conversation is due to start for Psychological Professions into Action.  Some of you may have already heard of this, some of you may already signed up and some of you may have been at the conference and heard more about it there.

As we get closer to New Year and festive holidays, it seems the right time to reflect on what a year it’s been. 

What’s the purpose of classifying things?  We do this every day – we use it to make sense of our world.  At its most basic, it is about pattern recognition and realising that some things are similar and some are not.  This can be distinguishing between adults and children, birds and bees, stones and trees.  These are not necessarily contentious but classification systems can be more contentious – describing ethnic background, gender preferences, diagnosis in healthcare.  These systems are designed with a purpose and sometimes an underlying framework.  Whether we agree with these or not, it is important to understand the system and its functions.

Yorkshire and Humber Psychological Practitioners Network 

Blog 

Why I do more homework than my clients

If you've learned anything about therapy before, especially something structured like CBT, you will know about therapy 'homework' or between session work where you tasks are set to complete before you next meet up.  Clients often have mixed feelings about doing this, sometimes it reminds them of school, for example. There's a lot of emphasis put on the idea of homework, so it's supposed to show how motivated people are and can affect the outcome (the more you put in, the more you get out). For the most part homework is set up with the therapist to be completed by the client, but sometimes there is also a bit of between session work done by the therapist too (usually completing surveys). However, that's not what I'm talking about when I say that I do homework for my clients.....

When I started looking at adapted interventions for the young people I work with in Early Intervention we started looking at ways to engage people using their own interests (this eventually became part of a project I run called heavy metal therapy but this isn't about that specifically). I started using music, lyrics and other media in the session that clients had selected to describe their feelings or experiences.  What started happening was that people asked me to listen to stuff or watch things in between the sessions so that we could use the session time to reflect on it.  Now obviously there are some pitfalls in this, not having infinite time being one of them, and the joys of playing very sweary metalcore in the office displeasing your colleagues.  But, over time, I have been converted to this approach for a few reasons: