Supporting youth workers: A reflective group consultation approach

Abstract

Forensic child and adolescent mental health services (FCAMHS) became a service within the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in 2018, and since then has become a multidisciplinary expansion of the Portman Clinic’s consultation and assessment work. FCAMHS provides specialised consultation, assessment and brief interventions to professionals, families, and young people across 13 boroughs in Central, North, and East London. As a service provider we aim to support third sector service users who are working directly with some of the most vulnerable, at risk, and risky young people in our area. Through an existing contact in a local youth organisation we began to discuss the idea of creating a space where professionals could come together as a group to reflect on experiences and identify areas of difficulty in their work. Reflective practice groups offered by the Portman Clinic are often psychoanalytically-informed consultation groups which offer a way of working with professionals and young people by reflecting on the meaning, communication and experience of the young person’s behaviour, and our own responses to this. Therefore, we decided to offer a reflective practice group to third sector professionals known to FCAMHS from local youth services and other local agencies, who work with some of the most vulnerable, challenging and high risk young people in this location of London. This reflective practice group has now been running for almost two years and provides a valuable space for youth workers to process and make sense of their work with this challenging forensic population.