Share review of St Aubyn Centre

St Aubyn Centre 2023-06-29 Person 4 5 0

James was treated with dignity and respect, he was able to give his opinion about his care and his voice was heard and taken into consideration. This was essential for James as he is a deep thinker with strong opinions who values a reasoned logical argument and is able to make a lot of decisions despite hi autism diagnosis. He had great care from the staff on the unit who were very kind and patient with him. I cannot thank the staff enough for giving him so much emotional support. The education team enabled James to complete his GCSEs on the unit, he would not have been able to manage this without their support. I am very grateful that they invested so much time and effort with James. James really enjoyed the educational trips and valued the activities run by Paul. The number and range of professionals looking after James on the unit was very impressive, it really felt that the care was wrapped around James and his needs. It was also refreshing to see how the unit welcomed the community teams to be involved including CAMHS, autism Beds, Service 6 and the school. This has enabled James transition home to feel much less daunting for me, thank you. The involvement I was able to have as a parent reassured me that James was being looked after well and I appreciated all the support available to me from the team. It was an empowering experience and I feel better equipped now James is back home. I really would like to thank all the team involved with James.

Sometimes decisions were made that I was not aware of (starting a new medication) or did not agree with, (unescorted leave), however, I had the opportunity to discuss these robustly in the MDT which I appreciated. Moving forwards, I think that the parents views should be sought about decisions and if there is a challenge to a decision, the parents views should be given more weight as they are the person that knows their child best. There were several occasions where I was not informed James had ligature events, despite me asking to be informed. If parents do want to be informed please let them know in a timely manner. I wanted to know so that I could provide extra support to James at those times, but also to see if I could identify any patterns which might help on his return home. I did occasionally feel I was judged if I could not answer a call straight away, particularly by the nursing team. As a full time working single mum with another teenager, you can imagine it was not because I was sitting doing nothing, in fact on several occasions it was because I was driving to or from Colchester which was a 2.5-3 hour journey each way. It may be useful for staff to reflect on this point as in my experience parents with children in this situation already feel judged by work colleagues, other family members, social services and friends. Having the same empathy that they have with the children to the parents would be good. These criticisms are meant in a constructive manner. Overall I feel that we had the most positive experience possible in a very difficult and dark situation. Hopefully we will never need this support again, however, if James or my daughter were ever to need an inpatient mental health admission, I would be asking for a referral to Longview. Please keep up the great work.