Benny the bear learns about Assessment & Therapy and visits the Anna Freud Centre!
Hi Guys, Benny here. I’ve written a slightly different blog this month, as I want to tell you all about my recent visit to the Anna Freud Centre with the Assessment & Therapy team. My friend Hannah, who is the Graduate Research Assistant took me there at the start of the month!
3rd February
Today, Hannah from the Assessment & Therapy team took me on a trip to London. It was quite the adventure! We got up early, caught a train, jumped on the underground and had a short walk – all before 9am. I was lucky I had Hannah to guide me – the underground is one big, busy, blurry maze!
Hannah took me to a place called the Anna Freud Centre. The Anna Freud Centre is a charity where all efforts go towards supporting children and their families. They focus on transforming mental health provisions, which they achieve through research.
Five Rivers has a research link with the Anna Freud Centre. Every child who is in care with Five Rivers has baseline assessments completed to look at their emotional and behavioural wellbeing, their experience of something called dissociation (where a young person’s brain can shut down to protect themselves from harm) and their experiences of trauma. Sometimes there are further assessments which are completed – these are for when it is identified that a child has a higher level of need.
A Five Rivers clinician looks at the results and helps support everyone to understand what the assessments mean. They will also help people to think together about what can be done to improve the life of the child.
The Anna Freud Centre also uses scores from the assessments to look at developing research to show what Five Rivers does to turn children’s lives around. Investing in research helps Five Rivers to look at what is working, what the data shows, and what they can do to make things even better!
We met for a couple of hours – there was a lot of information for my little ears to take in! It was really interesting to hear more about what the Assessment & Therapy team do, and how they work with the Anna Freud Centre. Hopefully they will take me on more trips around the country soon!