I have been a counsellor for more than twenty years and joined the inpatient support team at CUH in March 2022. Counselling a child in hospital could involve just one session by the bedside to building a relationship over a longer stay – I once supported a young boy and his mother for the course of their three-month admission. Some children and their parents or carers need to talk after a life-changing diagnosis or an accident, to share how they are feeling, to normalise it and vocalise what is in their mind.
Being an inpatient counsellor isn’t like traditional counselling, often the bed space is your talking space. We try to make it more private by drawing those blue curtains and turning chairs inwards, but it’s not always ideal. I will use my experience to invite a patient to talk and sometimes this might be without their parents. Some don’t even want to make eye contact so we might have to find other ways for them to open up. A girl kept a diary for her hospital stay and it was easier to talk about her feelings through the diary, as if it was an external, third person in the conversation. You have to be brave in this role, to forge the trust.
We make ward rounds every day and see patients through referrals, either from the ward, self-referral, clinical nurse specialist or clinical psychologist. The team also attends the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) daily crisis meeting which discusses the ongoing care of patients or new patients at hospitals across the county. I think everything changed with Covid – children who were able to keep things hidden with the routine of school had to stay at home with their families every day. We are seeing ramifications from that still.
I believe in the power of talking.
Julie
Young people aren’t sceptical about this, it’s adults that find it hard or question why it will help things. I try not to hold onto the emotion that comes with the role, when you hear difficult things that have happened to children. I’ll talk to myself on the drive home from work, I have a supportive family and we are a very tight team. Clinical supervision and peer supervision makes a difference too. I’m also a cryer, which is a positive event. There is a difference in the chemical makeup of happy and sad tears. The human body is amazing and crying is a way of getting rid of something.