‘2020: New Year, New Decade, and PIE Resolutions …’
10.01.2020: Happy New Year! — After a lovely couple of weeks off for Christmas and New Year holidays with friends and family, I returned to work this week in my role as Centrepoint Lead for Psychologically Informed Environments (PIE) refreshed and ready for the start of an exciting period in our PIE journey in 2020. It is not just a New Year, but also a New Decade, and reflecting this week, it felt like the opportunity for new resolutions and new beginnings even more than ever.
Therefore, I thought I would use this blog to think about what PIE specific New Year resolutions I could make. Leaving aside my usually vastly unsuccessful standard New Year resolutions (e.g. ‘I must eat less cake and more fruit and vegetables … I will join a gym etc.’), I have decided my first New Year PIE resolution is to embrace the opportunity my role affords me for travel to visit our wide range of services across the different regions in the U.K. (i.e. London, Manchester, Bradford, Barnsley and Sunderland). Whilst, there are commonalities about the challenges that homeless young people face across the country (c.f. https://centrepoint.org.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/experiences-of-youth-homelessness/), different regions do have different challenges and consequently, differing commissioned services. It has been fascinating and a great source of learning for me both professionally and personally to discover different parts of the country I have lived in my whole life, as well as to see the breadth and depth of our offers within the different regions (e.g. Housing & Support, Engagement, Helpline, Health & Wellbeing, Education, Training & Employment — https://centrepoint.org.uk/what-we-do/). I also now have an adult micro scooter to make pan-London travel economic, environmentally friendly and time efficient, which is proving to not only be great fun (until I fall off!) but also a good reminder of the importance of enjoying the journey and to not just focus solely on getting to the destination! Consequently, this increased ‘mindfulness’ of the process as well as the outcomes or objectives, is another of my New Year PIE resolutions, particularly in light of the not insignificantly sized task of embedding PIE across a national charity, and the reality that this is a ‘journey’ that will take time.
This year will also see the roll-out of the 2-day Centrepoint PIE Training for all our staff, a logistic exercise that I am extremely grateful to have the support of our very helpful Skills & Development Team to implement, as Centrepoint has over 500 staff across the five regions highlighted above! As mentioned before in previous blogs, this training isn’t about making all our staff ‘psychologists’ but to build on their exciting skills and knowledge and move our organisation to being more ‘psychologically informed’. This means we will be striving to be more collaborative or ‘relationship focused’ in our operations and strategic objectives as well as increasing the use of evidence based approaches, reflective practice, consideration of physical spaces and the evaluation of our data to assist in clinical governance and social policy work (c.f. https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/pie-an-introduction-to-psychologically-informed-environments/). One of my biggest challenges this year is to ensure that this PIE training is relevant for the different staff and roles within the organisation. Therefore, as I finalise the content of the PIE training over the coming weeks, another of my New Year PIE resolutions is to be flexible in the delivery of this to ensure that it meets the needs of attendees as well as being interesting and informative in content.
I have also spent some time this week catching up post-Christmas with a team in a London service that I have been offering Reflective Practice sessions to, as well as meeting with and setting up initial sessions for another new team. Reflecting on this existing reflective practice group this week, now that it has been running for several months, I realised that I have already started to notice the ‘psychological’ changes in staff who are receiving these regular reflective practice sessions. Specifically in terms of the language they are using, the awareness of the impact of early experiences on later behaviour, their ability to start to ‘think about thinking’ and what might be underlying different behaviours, as well as their increased trust, mutual support and collaborative working within their team. This has been despite some difficult challenges over this period and some complex case discussions including concerns about mental health, domestic violence and gang affiliations amongst the homeless young people within the service. Informal feedback about the value of the sessions has been positive, and attendance has been good, despite the obvious logistic challenges of running sessions within a busy service in working hours when staff can have other demands on their time or be required to deal with crises or emergencies! However, having that regular space for the staff team to come together and speak about the complex young people and the challenges that they are facing, with the sharing of ideas and a mutual support to build staff resilience, appears to be having an impact.
As a psychologist who has facilitated and taken part in reflective practice for many years, these positive shifts are not too surprising but still rewarding. Since ‘reflective practice’ was first labelled as such by the philosopher Donald Schon (1983) as part of the process of continuous learning, it has been argued to be ‘… one of the cornerstones of recovery-oriented and person-centred ways of working, as well as a key activity for professionals involved in care and support for vulnerable individuals’ (c.f. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/340022/1/Good%2520practice%2520guide%2520-%2520%2520Psychologically%2520informed%2520services%2520for%2520homeless%2520people%2520.pdf; p65). Consequently, another of my New Year PIE resolutions is to ensure that monthly reflective practice sessions are embedded across all teams within the organisation, so that our staff can have the time and space to ‘think psychologically’. Importantly, this will enable us to move from that common default position in our busy working lives of just ‘do … do … do’ to a more effective ‘do … think … do’ position that increases our organisational and personal awareness, learning and change; all ultimately for the benefit of the homeless young people that are referred to Centrepoint services.
Finally, my last New Year PIE resolution is to build up the capacity to deliver PIE in Centrepoint over the coming decade, with the expansion of the number of Clinical Psychologists within Centrepoint from just myself, to a small PIE Team (2.5FTE). Building relationships is a key part of any PIE, but this takes time, effort and availability, so I am very excited that the organisation has agreed to invest in regional PIE Clinical Psychologists as the next step in Centrepoint’s PIE journey for 2020/2021. Just prior to Christmas, we were therefore successful in recruiting one Clinical Psychologist for the London region, and we have further interviews arranged later this month for a post in our North Region. There is also a further Clinical Psychologist post for our London region currently out for advert (due to close shortly). Therefore, if you are a Clinical Psychologist reading this blog, who fancies a new job for a New Year / Decade and you have an interest in working in a PIE within the charity sector at Centrepoint to address youth homelessness and #changethestory, please do consider applying. Further details of the role and the application process are available here: https://jobs.centrepoint.org.uk/job/111731 and I do hope you will consider joining us, and making some of your own New Year PIE resolutions …
