
Sharing knowledge across the Atlantic - Written by Amy Franklin
Following the highly successful Mental Health Symposium in London this summer, Walking With The Wounded was invited to meet Home Base at their Centre of Excellence in Boston. Home Base is a partnership of the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital; offering world-class clinical care and support, in addition to fitness and mind-body wellness programmes for Service Members and Veterans who struggle with the invisible wounds of war. They also offer counselling and support to family members.
We had
the privilege of joining Home Base for two days in September. With our flights
donated and accommodation booked, four of us set off. This included WWTW trustee Professor Neil Greenburg,
an Academic Psychiatrist, specialist in the
understanding and management of psychological trauma, occupational mental
ill-health and post-traumatic stress disorder, Fergus Williams WWTW Director of
Operations, Amy Franklin Deputy Director of Operations and Carolyn Brown, WWTW
Clinical Lead and mental health nurse.
Home
Base offer a number of programmes to support veterans and their families; a two
day assessment for those with a suspected Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), a two
week intensive treatment programme for those with PTSD or a TBI, a four day
intensive programme for Special Forces
veterans and regional outpatient support.
Thanks
to the Home Base team, we were briefed on each of these programmes and in
particular, guided through all the elements of support in the two-week
intensive programme which includes art therapy, nutrition and cooking, fitness
and wellbeing, prolonged exposure therapy (PE), cognitive processing therapy
(CPT), dialectical behaviour
therapy (DBT), medication reviews and family support. We were even able to take part in a fitness
session and sample the produce from the group nutrition work.
There
were two key reasons for this visit. Firstly, we wanted to share knowledge and
experience with our colleagues in the USA, for the benefit of veterans and
their families in the UK and overseas. For me personally a few things stood
out:
1)
The
importance of nutrition for mental and physical health. Whilst we are not able
to incorporate a nutritional programme within the work that we do in the UK, I
feel there is scope to better equip our team of Employment Advisors and Family Support
Workers to be able to provide information to service users on the importance of
nutrition, and to tap into free resources that are produced by Home Base. We
are talking to the Home Base Nutritionist to see what is feasible.
2)
Home Base are
about to launch a new database for their client information and coincidentally
they will be using the same software that WWTW adopted a few years ago. By
speaking more closely on this, I feel we could improve our system. With
improved systems we can offer a more efficient service and collect better
quality data that in turn helps to raise more funds and increase our services.
3) Both organisations contact service users after they have been
discharged from the programme to see how they are six and twelve months later.
It is not always easy to do this, but when done properly we can learn more
about our services and what we can improve. We can also make sure the service
user is doing OK and put them in touch with support if they are not. By sharing
knowledge with Home Base of what is working and what is not in doing follow ups
we can learn and improve.
The
trip was insightful. Now that we understand the detail, we are keen to take up
the offer to send ten UK veterans and their family support person to attend the
two-week treatment programme with Home Base. We will send five groups of two
veterans starting in early 2020, which will allow us to ensure we are
appropriate selecting those veterans who will benefit most from the programme
and tailoring the before and after care in the UK accordingly.
It is
hugely exciting to be working collaboratively with our friends at Home Base in
Boston to help shape our programmes in the UK and provide treatment to a small
number of veterans who may benefit from their work. We look forward to sharing
the results in 2020. Huge thanks to Brigadier General (ret) Jack
Hammond, Michael Allard and all the team at Home Base for your hospitality.