Health professionals from Stockport have shared how using Talking Mats has positively impacted on their clinical work.

Laura, our North West  Associate, met up with Carla Innes, Clinical Psychologist for learning disability from Healthy Young minds Stockport (a child and adolescent mental health service provided by Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust) and Clare Royle, Family Support Worker,from the Children’s Learning Disability Team (provided by Stockport NHS Foundation Trust). The two organisations work closely together to provide joined up care to young people with a learning disability.

Six months ago Carla, Clare and seven others from the Healthy Young Minds Stockport Team  received training to enable them to introduce Talking Mats as part of their challenging behaviour pathway.

Carla and Claire said that the staff team are very positive about the impact of Talking Mats. The overall impression is that Talking Mats has enabled staff to gain an individualised sense of the child or young person they are working with, as well as empowering the children and young people to share their views and opinions. Carla also notes that using Talking Mats has helped her to focus on the child/young person’s abilities/potential – their ‘zone of proximal development’ – and to ensure that everyone is working within that.
Some of the other positive features of using Talking Mats include:
– Providing ‘headspace’ for the child/young person to process their thoughts and to really consider what is important to them.
– Giving a holistic, child/YP centred account and narrative of their feelings and behaviour.
– Helping to inform and direct clinical decision making e.g. introduction of an approach such as CBT.
– Enabling children/young people who have previously refused, or been very reluctant, to share their views and opinions about topics which have been troubling them for example, school attendance and issues with sleep.
– Providing of a communication framework which is neutral and non-threatening – much less intense than direct verbal questioning or conversation.
– Helping to make abstract concepts more concrete for the listener to understand.
– Being a safe, flexible and quick method of finding practical solutions and determining direct actions.
– Enabling the listener to gain a better understanding of the thinker’s level of knowledge and understanding about a particular topic such as healthy eating. This can help inform capacity assessments e.g. in terms of medical consent or the use of medication. The mental capacity act states that appropriate support should be given to young people to make informed decisions and to communicate those decisions.
In addition, from a wider team perspective, Carla and Clare report that they have all noticed benefits in terms of consistency of Talking Mats use by all members of the multi-disciplinary team. Each team member using the Talking Mats tool is working from a slightly different perspective; using Talking Mats ensures that the child/young person is kept at the centre of the process. This results in a truly holistic view of the child/young person’s feelings, views and opinions.

Conversation with friends is key to our well- being.

Talking Mats is a tool to maximise people’s capacity to communicate about things that matter to them.   For people with communication difficulties the ability to have a good conversation is restricted.  For this reason we have developed Conversation sets, described in an earlier blog http://www.talkingmats.com/talking-mats-conversation-sets/ 

The topics include Holidays, Gardens, Trips out, Sport.  Football even has one if its own!

Some of the members of the National Involvement Network in Edinburgh tried out the conversation sets.  Fiona’s conversation is generally limited to responding to questions and she has a tendency to agree with what other people say.  Using the Holidays topic, she told me that she liked camping and added that she had tried this a long time ago when she was a member of the Girl Guides.    I told her I had also been camping with the Girl Guides so immediately this created a bond between us.  Sharing experiences can be the start of a friendship.

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David and James used the Football topic to chat about a recent match they had attended together.   Before using the mat to discuss the match they did not know that they had felt differently about the stadium and the crowd.  This was a surprise and stimulated further chat. Together they relayed a funny incident that had happened and we all had a good laugh- another aspect of building friendships.

David and James have good conversational skills but the Talking Mat took their conversation to a more detailed level.  For people who have difficulty getting involved in conversations these topics allow them to share experiences and find links with other people.