Kooth - Video and audio transcripts

uh we'll move on to the next one so now we've got the offer around Kooth so hopefully Angela is there for us.
Are you coming up now I can see you yes I am here um Richard yeah I might have to just I don't know how many slides you've got or whose presentation this is so I'll try and it's Tom's but I think last time we did skip through quite a few bits because quite a few different ones but I'll leave it up to to give a bit of an overview all right yeah no problem at all um so my name's Angela Jones uh I work for the Kooth service and uh for those of you who haven't heard of Kooth it's an online advice support and counselling service for young people and across Coventry we offer the service for young people from age 11 and we're starting to work with where we started we have been working with young people in year six at the moment who are approaching their transition to high school and we'll go up to the age of 25 so that's the eve of their 26th birthday if you can go to the next slide please so just to let you know Kooth's been around for the last 21 years it's not just something that's kind of been created overnight or over lockdown um it as a result of that um it's been tried tested robust all the systems that are in place to support young people as I said we're well tested so um the whole reason it was it came about was um some young people had certain barriers to access in some mainstream services or um we're having struggles whether it was accessing them you know getting their parents to take them to counselling or their therapeutic interventions or even just admitting that they needed some help and a counsellor back in 2001 discovered that young people seemed happier to have some email support and then that developed into a whole platform which has kind of grown and grown from then. As I've mentioned it's all online for young people it's anonymous and it's all self-referral so there's no referrals or any referral forms for any other services to complete it's just a matter of letting a young person know that the service is there and it's safe and it's for them. Kooth's a flagship service and it's won many awards we try and integrate with other services we do have a face-to-face Council service in some other parts of the country but not locally um and basically we support young people with all sorts of needs um from many different backgrounds and our key message to young people is you know it doesn't matter how big or small you know their issue is or what they're going through um you know come to to Kooth in the first instance if they haven't got anybody immediately around them to start that conversation and lots of young people will sign up to the service to get validation about what's going on for them they may um not understand what's going on for them and so they'll through the support of the counselling team will begin to explore that and then prepare themselves to articulate it to maybe adults around them so it's quite an important space for young people to use if you can go on to the next okay so this is an overview of the whole service really so as I've mentioned it's anonymous for young people when they sign up they don't give us any of their personal information and it's down to them um at a time that they feel right to share that information with us this removes a big stigma and a big barrier to young people opening up to any issues or anything that they're going through and the other uh powerful element of the website is that um there's a lot of choice in how that young person gets their support and quite often they'll journey through it in their own way um as it's as it's indicated here there's  three main sections to the support um on the left hand side of this diagram um there is um the examples of the self-help resources that we've got available so there's all sorts of things that they can do on on the site around goal setting journalling just checking in with their moods to help them figure out what's going on for them and progress whether where they're at in the section in in the middle and there's community support and and there is a good community feel in Kooth so under this section there's kind of three main subsections if you like we have a magazine section so these are articles and there are thousands of articles on this in this section on all sorts of different topics a lot of those articles have been written by young people and then moderated by our clinical team some articles are created by our clinical team and are often based on presenting needs so for example earlier in the year um we were getting a lot of young people quite fearful of the Ukraine war and what that meant for us and especially when I think Putin mentioned nuclear and um so we were able to kind of get a lot of content on there on managing those anxieties so there's a lot of magazines uh articles on there we've hadn't recently we've had a huge push on gender and creating a lot more content for young men um another section of that is for discussion boards and these are forums this is where young people can either post about a problem that they're going through or they can support other young people that they get that they're going through problems or they can just read through the forums and see if there's anybody going through something similar. All of these are fully moderated before they go live on our site so we can make sure that there's no chance of a young person being groomed or stalked or bullied or you know trolled in any way is a very supportive space and we also moderate to take out any identifying information and anything triggering and then finally a new part of our site is the activity Hub so at the moment we've got about 22 activities on there that are designed to build the skill set and resilience of young people to be able to manage their own emotional well-being and so this is a really popular part of the site young people have stepped through an activity they can have a go if they want they can tick that they've had a go and then they can go into a discussion with other service users and share their experiences again fully moderated but one of the biggest ones for this is practising asking for help another one is making a um what you call it a mood box and yeah there's there's lots of variations on what those activities are and then finally we have our practitioner intervention so this is heavily led by our clinical team so young people can go into a live chat and we're open every single day of the year for those chats um Monday to Friday we start at 12 noon and finish at 10 at night Saturday and Sunday it starts at six and finishes at 10. um it's staffed by um qualified counsellors and qualified practitioners.
Young people just need to click on the requested chat and when a counsellor is available they'll take them into a chat space and begin to engage with them um as if they were in a counselling session or a therapeutic intervention session so that they'll go through contracts in safeguarding and look at what their presenting issues are and all that aspect and then they'll support the young person a young person's entitled to an hour's counselling session a week. We do a lot of assessment to establish needs and we're constantly monitoring through that process the team is as I said fully qualified everybody's been enhanced DBS checked they get clinical supervision CPD you know there's a high lots of them got expertise from different areas another way that young people can get support is through our 24-hour messaging so young people can send a message at any time but they are told that they might not get a reply instantly like they would get a reply instantly in chat um it's like an internal emailing system so they can send us a message at any time and then a counsellor or one of the clinical team will pick that message up and respond and we usually respond in our chat opening times but they're given a notification about can I go on to the next slide I don't know this is where I okay in terms of just this is just gives you some illustrations of what to expect so a young person does need a device that connects to the internet and that could be a mobile phone tablet laptop and they will need an internet connection some schools provide that for young people which is great the sign up process is very simple very quick they need to share the area that they live so they would choose Coventry from that and then the place they live would be a locality within Coventry this is slightly out of date now so there's a new feature on this where a young person if they want to they can choose to put the first part of their postcode in just to make it easier and quicker for them uh they have to tell us when they were born in terms of year and month but not the actual date they have to choose the gender that best describes them their ethnicity as they identify and then I think if you can continue Richard onto the next slide they then have to pick um a username and password we actively encourage them to use a username that's not their own own name no tags for a game
but to pick something completely completely unique just for this site and then they would pick a password as they would for most other sites as well we don't ask for any emails so if they if they need to reset their account or they forget their password they will need to re-register and just let somebody know um on our team send a message to let them know that um they've forgotten their password and they've got ways of matching up records on the back end you can go to the next slide please um I think I've probably covered most of these so um I think in terms of the chat the other thing to bear in mind it's all text based so young people haven't got to be worried about being in front of a video being in front of somebody face to face again this takes some of the barriers away from young people expressing themselves and similarly they don't have to speak so it's a bit like how they're messaging each other on their their mobiles um if you can go to the next one I think in the covered lots of this already
yeah I don't I think I pretty much told you that messaging the team I've just discussed that as well by the way if if the chat service isn't open there is an emergency connection where it links to services like Samaritan's child Line and other sites like that I've kind of alluded to the clinical team um this is a vast team I think we've got about two or three hundred people in our clinical team now across the country consisting of senior practitioners who manage and support the team so that there's always support around a counsellor in case they um anything's disclosed or there's a safeguarding issue that arises there's obviously the counsellors that do the therapeutic work and you know keep that very structured approach again lots of different modalities um that we can draw on and then finally we've got some emotional well-being practitioners that'll pick up some of the psycho-education side of things maybe working with some of the younger people in our that come to the to the website if you go to the next slide please
um we do work with some young people that are accessing other counselling service or camh services we wouldn't um be delivering any kind of therapeutic intervention but we can continue we can support those young people often we work alongside other therapists and it might be sharing things like safety plans or strategies that have been discussed in their you know in their counselling sessions but it means they've got additional support between appointments or at weekends when sometimes things can unravel very quickly um yeah the emotional prayer well-being practitioners as well are very involved in the moderation side of things so making sure your users are safe at all time um and that um you know they're not disclosing things that need to be addressed and that we're safeguarding at that level as well I think I'll probably go into the end I've already talked about the community features a good sense of community there talked about the magazines and the forums oh those are the mini activities thank you for that love this is a good slide so as you can see practicing asking him help sending a letter to someone I think my favorite that's not up there is creating your own superhero so young people can kind of create their own superhero and explore that you go to the next slide please I think I've touched on self-help resources and the journal section um but this is just a screenshot of it this is a very popular space for young people to express themselves and again um we have our emotional well-being practitioners reading through these to make sure young people are safe while they're expressing themselves as well.
uh we're always goal setting within the sessions that we have therapeutically so we can kind of um see the distance travelled that a young person's made it's always goals focused on what the young person wants to achieve um and we've now moved this in onto the front end of the site so that young people don't have to see a counsellor necessarily but can set their own goals and monitor their progress and from there if you go to the next one and just to also draw your attention these are more recent developments for the Kooth um Kooth Service uh this doesn't need any logins or registrations to access these are for open view but Kooth now has an Instagram account so to reach out to young people we have various Spotify but I never said that Spotify playlists on all sorts of different topics and themes and again we have a lot of podcasts and there's been some recently on managing stress and exam stress has been a popular one more recently thank you
just to give you a quick idea on on case management everything is recorded that a young person does on the site when they're in a chat these are the types of things that are logged I mean there's an obvious transcript between the therapist and the young person but there's also case notes so duration to chat number of sessions presenting issues the kind of things that you would expect us to be logging really if you go to the next page um safeguarding is absolutely the core principle of ours  it's part of everything we do um we have a very expert clinical team safeguarding there's governance involved in that there's lots of clear protocols guidance risk management strategies and we strive to work with other external services as well um just to kind of illustrate the you know safeguarding it there are some concerns about the anonymity we have our own way of dealing with unholding that risk. If you go to the next page please in terms of Engagement um Tom who's not here and I'm standing in for Tom at the moment he can offer um schools and services um some engagement activities I suppose so we can do an introductory presentation and show young people how the site works do assembly like presentations we can theme those as well if need be we do lots of staff training so teachers teams in schools but you know in other services we can kind of come out to your teams and talk about Kooth show you the website go to the next page please
Different parent and carer sessions sometimes we link in with parents evenings in schools but and some schools have asked us to put parent and carer sessions on um we we've got special workshops around lgbtq plus stressful anxiety general well-being if you go to the next one these a lot of these are focused for young people to be fair writing workshop male targeted types of workshops uh peer support and self-care and we also do a sign up session where we can guide young people through signing up and just answering any of their questions they might have about service that's funny oh good that was a bit that was a long presentation thank you and again please feel free to ask me questions.
 Thank you Ange and thanks for stepping in as well um did really well going through all that thank you so if anyone Toms the engagement lead like you say so if you want Tom to come out and speak to schools I think that's part of his role as well isn't it to introduce kooth um like you mentioned so uh yeah there's opportunities to delays with the organisation and I have put popped in the chat as well if anybody wants to find out a bit more about Individual Services then please do contact them directly as well I'm sure they won't mind us to put some details on the slides anyway so that's an opportunity to find a bit more of a focus into Focus support offer um if you wanted to find out more