Northgate Hospital Autism Services

Northumberland Tyne and Wear Foundation NHS Trust

Mitford House in-patient autism services is part of a wider service for people with autism with or without Learning Disabilities who have additional challenging behaviours.  It is a national service and people come from all over the country to spend a short amount of time there.  One of the aims of the service is to help patients and their parents and carers find a service closer to home within their communities so they can live closer to home.

Parents and carers are widespread and still want to be involved in the care of their children.  One of things this project wanted to achieve was to see how the service could engage those parents more and offer them something for themselves.

Curiosity Creative delivered three facilitated workshops with a group of six parents (three pairs of parents) and liaised long distance in between over email and telephone to enable parents to tell their stories.  Those stories with consent we have uploaded online.

The finished stories are being used within the service to help staff at Northgate Hospital inform themselves how to provide a better service for both the patients and their parents and carers.  The stories are being used in training for staff to help them gain a better understanding of patient and parent/carer experiences to improve services as well as providing an opportunity for parents to get together and share experiences with each other.

The project was made possible with support from the Community Foundation Tyne and Wear and Northumberland.

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