A multi-disciplinary team, with staff from a variety of professions, including School Nursing, Mental Health Nursing, Paediatric Nursing, Health Visiting, and Social Work. They work to support the professionals to support the emotional health and wellbeing of Children and Young People.
The EHWP’s were the original team members when the EHWP Team launched in January 2018. The aim of the team is to support the network (mostly schools), with helping to signpost and give advice and guidance in relation to the emotional health and wellbeing needs of CYP. The EHWP’s do not ‘case hold’ and the team sits in the ‘Getting Advice’ quadrant of iThrive. The EHWP Team is led by Sarah Stacey.
The team operates a duty system, offering telephone/MS TEAMS support to professionals from education settings (primary, secondary, colleges, and special schools) as well as other professionals such as General Practitioners and Social Care. If you are concerned about a child or young person’s emotional wellbeing please contact the team via ccs.ehw@nhs.net and they will offer you a 30 minute discussion. These discussions give you a safe space to think about what your concerns are and the practitioner can help guide you as to what the next steps may be. Very often no referral to any service is needed – and the EHWP’s can send out information about relevant resources and explain how they are best used with the child or young person by the adults around them.
As well as operating the duty system, EHWP’s also provide staff training to education establishments. This is currently in the form of self-directed learning packages along with a reflective session facilitated by an Emotional Health and Wellbeing Practitioner. They also offer staff support sessions for schools. The popular mental health forums will be re-launching in Spring 2022.
The EHWP Team also started the Cambridgeshire Local Services Briefing webinars in April 2021. This is where local services who offer support to children, young people and families where there is a concern about a child’s emotional wellbeing can share information about their service with a wide audience of professionals such as school staff, health workers, social care district workers and GPs. These will be held four times a year.