In May this year we made the difficult decision to put the waiting list on hold as we had a lot of young people who had been waiting for support for some time. We were simply unable to meet this demand with the capacity that we had.
We have always struggled to meet demand but by introducing a programme of summer support in 2023 we had been able to nearly halve the numbers of young people waiting for support. However due to the continued high level of referrals, we were once again finding it extremely difficult to offer timely support to all young people that need it. We needed to do something different.
Our Children and Young People’s Service Manager and our Communications Manager worked closely together to develop information materials and to adapt some of the programmes that we use. We then made these available on our website to all those who enquired about a service – offering advice on how to use them where this was needed. This freed up staff time. By not having to make contact with and assess new referrals they were able to focus exclusively on the delivery of an extensive Summer Programme of group and individual support. These resources were accessed on almost 500 occasions over the period with each visitor using the page an average of 5 times.
The pause in assessing referrals meant that we were able to run 19 support group programmes for children and young people across the Worcestershire area over the summer holidays. We have recently finished our final Autumn groups and are so pleased that we currently have no young people waiting for a service over the Christmas period.
We started taking referrals again in Worcestershire in October and – with the resources that we have created and some new staff in place thanks to funding from the West Mercia Police and Crime Commissioner – we are in a better position to offer help and support as and when needed to children and young people in the county.
View our new resource page here