importance of listening
Last month the blog featured the Derbyshire Mental Health Helpline & Support Service, which started in early 2020 and expanded dramatically to meet the needs of people struggling during the pandemic. P3 is partnering with the NHS on this 24/7 service for people needing support or advice with their mental health. The helpline has recently started collecting data on a new system, and has some impactful stats and feedback to show for it.
Currently, the team takes around 70 calls per day and from September 2020 to January 2021, the number of calls has risen from just over 1500 a month to well over 2000.
One of the key aspects of the service is that P3 staff taking the initial calls can explore non-medical, community-based and self-help alternatives with callers, to avoid escalating to clinical NHS staff where this is not needed. Over the last month, P3 have managed to de-escalate around 70 per cent of the calls made to the helpline, which has made time for the NHS team to concentrate on the triage aspect.
NHS staff also take calls on the helpline from professionals such as police who may need to potentially section someone who is experiencing severe mental distress for their own safety; at least 90 per cent of these calls were descalated in December and January, and no section was needed.
“It's nice to be treated like a human being of importance, not just a statistic”
- Feedback from person using the helplineThe real impact is shown in the feedback the service has received. One person who used the helpline in October last year said:
“When I spoke to a member of the team I knew that she was actually listening to what I was saying, was very empathetic, was thinking of different solutions to help alleviate my current symptoms/problems. I couldn't have been treated any nicer, fairer, more efficiently, competently or professionally, and when she told me that she was going to chase my referrals up, I actually believed that she was going to do it.
"In the past I've been told by other so-called 'caring' professional people that they'll do something for me or when I was opening up to them about very personal things that I find hard to think about let alone speak about, I could tell that they weren't even half-listening to me.
“When I told [the helpline staff member] how I was feeling, the mess that my mental health was in, the number of stress/psychologically induced seizures I was having a day, she was genuinely concerned about what I was telling her.”
“You have sympathetic, understanding and caring members of staff working on the helpline team which helps a lot when it comes to calming down a patient who is suffering with their mental health!”
