Bury Hospital One of First in Country to Complete Trial

Cygnet Hospital Bury’s Primrose Ward has become one of the first Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the country to successfully complete a Safewards trial.

Safewards is an evidence based clinical model with 10 associated interventions designed to improve the safety of everyone in inpatient mental health wards.

The ten interventions include “Talk down”, “Calm down methods”, “reassurance” “Bad news mitigation” and “Discharge messages”.

Previously Safewards has only been implemented in adult services. Primrose Ward was selected by NHS England to be one of twenty services from different organisations to take part in a national trial to implement Safewards in a CAMHS environment.

Cygnet Hospital Bury, on Bolton Road, provides a wide range of inpatient mental health services for men and women including specialist deaf services and CAMHS provision for adolescents.

Primrose Ward is its CAMHS Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit for young people aged between 12 and 18. The service provides for young people who exhibit a high level of risk that cannot be safely managed in a CAMHS general adolescent unit.

Ward manager Jo Bible has led the team over the last 18 months to implement the ten Safewards strategies, all in co-production with the young people. To date they have fully implemented seven of the ten interventions with work continuing on the remaining three.

Jo said: “I’m really proud of how the staff team and young people have taken on board the Safewards interventions. After a number of training sessions with Nick Horne, our Safewards Lead, we allocated staff leads to carry out each intervention. We then identified which of the young people would be best placed to be involved with each intervention.

“We discussed the interventions in community meetings and on a day-to-day basis with the young people. This has had a really positive effect on the ward in terms of increasing engagement.

“I’d like to thank all the young people for their participation. I also want to thank the entire ward team including senior support workers and our occupational therapy lead.”

Ali Curtis, Cygnet’s CAMHS Nursing Lead, said: “I’m so proud of what the team has achieved. It has not been an easy time managing a pandemic, staff changes, and some really unwell young people but the Primrose team have absolutely smashed it to complete their Safewards trial.”

To find out more about the ward click here.