The Adult Mental Health Family Group Conferencing service in Essex has developed a training programme with the aim of sharing the skills and the ethos of FGC, and to demonstrate its place in the provision of collaborative mental healthcare and decision-making as widely as possible.
Our hope with the training is to promote the idea of choice, empowerment and holding onto safe uncertainty. So often within mental health services – particularly where safeguarding matters are concerned – these three components are not present. We find that decisions are made on behalf of the adult under services, and that difficult conversations are not held. In addition, the benefits of working systemically lie at the heart of FGC; of involving someone’s self-identified network and working together to plan around what feels important and relevant to them and the problems as they define and experience them.
Our training combines both theory and practice to ensure trainees are able to observe and try out the process whilst also absorbing the ethos, procedures and theories behind the approach. There are ten theory sessions that range from the history of the FGC model to safeguarding and children’s involvement in adult mental health FGCs. Ongoing reflection is an essential part of the process, as well as consideration as to how the learning could be applied to trainees’ other clinical roles. It is so often said that “everyone could benefit from an FGC” and this is part of its brilliance. It is a non-clinical approach that feels relevant to people, it makes sense to people, and everyone is accountable to the decisions made because they have been collectively agreed-upon. If the training can encourage clinicians to think and work more systemically – and to trust that people know themselves best, and with good information can make good decisions for themselves – this will hopefully improve the experience of clinical interventions.
The programme is comprehensive to not only teach the basics of FGC role but to give staff the space to consider aspects of practice such as safe uncertainty and difficult conversations, as mentioned above, as well the Social Graces, or identifying and managing transference in order to understand the reciprocal relationship and what each person brings to the space. We aim to equip practitioners to be allies to people accessing adult mental health services and their families, in a system that can be difficult to have a voice in, or a clear understanding of why decisions are made. Furthermore, to promote understanding between the whole network and to gain a clearer picture of layers that may not get noticed in an individualistic approach to problems.
We are about to train new starters to be based on Essex’s acute adult inpatient wards. We will be using the training programme and continuously evaluating its efficacy in different contexts. Our hope is that it continues to promote relationships and understanding at a time that can be particularly unfamiliar and alienating to network members and individuals. FGC continues to hold the assumption that all network members (both professional and informal) are able to make better decisions when expertise is shared and everyone is well-informed.
Alivia Bray and Lyndsey Taylor, Essex Mental Health FGC team