Removing the stigma for young people surrounding emotional and mental help

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Removing the stigma for young people surrounding
emotional and mental help
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What is Kooth?

• Kooth provides joined-up online support for young
  people aged 11-25
• It is a pioneering Early Intervention and Rapid
  Referral service

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What Is Kooth?

• Kooth provides young people with
• a free
• confidential
• safe
• always accessible
• anonymous
• and non-threatening way of asking for help when
  they first need it

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What Is Kooth?

• Via the Kooth.com site young people can receive
  short-term counselling and advice from
  professional counsellors who are specifically
  trained to work online with young people

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What Is Kooth?

• If the situation requires it and the young person
  agrees, the counsellors are also able to assign a
  young person to a specialist worker who will
  advice them online via Kooth

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What Is Kooth?

• Counsellors are also able to make a referral to
  local face-to-face specialist worker or
  organisation
• Additionally, young people can talk with other
  young people who are either going through or who
  have successfully dealt with the same problems on
  fully moderated peer support message boards and
  blogs

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Young People and the Internet

• Young people see the Internet as their medium
• Take services to where young people are - dont
  expect them to come to you
• Most young people dont remember life before the
  Internet
• It therefore makes sense to put services for
  young people online

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The Kooth website
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Kooth is easy to use
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Chat room counselling on Kooth
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History

• Kooth launched in March 2004 in Stockport
• Kooth was planned so that it met the objectives
  of the Governments Every Child Matters programme

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History

• The reasons why Kooth was launched
• high numbers of looked after children
• long waiting lists for therapeutic services
• high thresholds for family support services
• the provision and uptake of counselling services
  by young men was poor

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Kooth is a multi-award winning service

• Kooth won the
• LGC Award for Innovation in 2005
• Local Government IT Excellence Award in 2008
• Kooth was also voted runner-up in the NHS Live
  Award for Innovation and Improvement at the NHS
  Health Social Care Awards in 2005

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Do young people use Kooth?

• 3,269 new users of Kooth between August 2007 and
  March 2008
• 9,200 young people are registered on Kooth
• 27 are young men and 73 young women
• Peak age of new users is 13 to 16 year olds
• 43 heard about Kooth via school
• 9 of new users are non-white

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Who uses Kooth?

• Young people across the tiers
• Kooth successfully manages to be a tier one
  (universal access) and tier two service
• It also provides support to young people at tier
  three
• around 23 of Kooth users have been through
  CAMHs, are using CAMHs services or are on the
  waiting list

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Who uses Kooth?

• Transition - 33 of young people using Kooth fall
  into the 16-19 age bracket

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Achievements Outcomes

• In its first two years, Kooth referred 38 young
  people into outreach teams - intensive support
  was put in place and savings of over 800,000
  were made

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Achievements Outcomes

• Between August 2007 and March 2008, 792 young
  people used chat counselling and 1,012 used
  private messaging counselling

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Achievements Outcomes

• In quarter-ended December 2007 young people spent
  2,532 hours logged into Kooth, in quarter-ended
  March 2008 it was 3,315 hours, and in
  quarter-ended June 2008 it was 4,200 hours

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Achievemnts Outcomes

• Multi-agency working
• there are 22 non-Kooth staff from a variety of
  agencies working on the service

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Kooth a truly transformational service

• Kooth has broken the stigma surrounding mental
  and emotional health

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Kooth a truly transformational service

• Kooth has enabled young people to access support
  via their preferred medium
• 89 of Kooth users say they prefer online
  counselling to telephone support
• Kooth has become a valuable complement and backup
  to existing statutory services such as CAHMS

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Kooth a truly transformational service

• Kooth has reached very vulnerable young people
  who would never has accessed face-to-face
  services
• Kooth has literally saved lives

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To find out how to get Kooth operational in your
area

• Contact the Kooth Service Director, Elaine
  Bousfield, on
• 0845 330 7090
• elaine_at_xenzone.com
• 07974 190136