Working for the NHS was miserable so I started dance classes on my ward

Things are not going well in the NHS right now. It is under sustained attack day after day; the media bad-mouths it, while the people who work for it are being asked to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources.

In my 15 years of study and training, I have watched cuts immiserate the services we can offer children and their parents all over the country. Fewer funded paediatric nurse training spots; local closures leading to clogged emergency departments; and £80bn slashed from mental health services resulting in ever more troubled young people occupying acute hospital beds, because there’s simply nowhere else for them to go.

Working in a health service under pressure – one that is low in finances, low in staff and low in morale – is hard. And things are only going to get worse. The current political climate actively pits health workers and patients against each other, the opposite of what caring relationships are supposed to look like. Under this kind of pressure, it’s not only the patients who need healing, it’s also the staff.

I felt this myself. I would see my colleagues, hungry and thirsty from lack of breaks with circles under their eyes, struggle to do their jobs. Being in hospital can be scary and alienating for sick children at the best of times – how much worse when the staff looking after them are too tired and busy even to smile?

I decided to do something about it. Barnet Bopping is a pilot project I developed with colleagues that brings dance to the paediatric ward of Barnet hospital, in north London. The aim is to help patients, parents and staff feel happier, healthier, less stressed and more connected by doing physical activity together that’s mood lifting and fun.

One morning, we gathered some of the kids and staff in the playroom and I asked a friend – who happens to be a nurse on the ward – to lead a hip-hop dance class. At first it felt a bit awkward; here we were, in the middle of the working day, my colleagues and I, swaying our hips with the consultant. And in front of the parents. But with every new move, and with every song, we all got more and more into it. Before long we forgot who we were, and even where we were. It didn’t matter whether we were a doctor, nurse, patient, parent or cleaner – all that mattered was the music. By the end, the atmosphere on the ward was really, well, happy.

I noticed how things changed after that. The boundaries between the nurses and doctors were gone. People smiled more. The team communicated better. It made us all wonder why we didn’t do things like that more often.

On its own this will not fix the NHS. But it is a way for us, in our local general hospital, to take matters back into our own hands, to resist the destruction of our health service and try to offer the best care we can to our patients.

Wellbeing should be for all of us. Health workers operate under huge stress, all while feeling as if we aren’t really doing justice to our patients. We need take care of each other – health workers and patients alike. Whether it’s standing up for patient safety or being creative at work, we stand with our patients. Cuts or no cuts, this is the kind of spirit that hasn’t yet been crushed in the NHS.

If you would like to contribute to our Blood, sweat and tears series which is about memorable moments in a healthcare career, please read our guidelines and get in touch by emailing sarah.johnson@theguardian.com.

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Working for the NHS was miserable so I started dance classes on my ward

Help for children"s mental health, from apps to parenting classes

Figures show that about a quarter of a million under-18s in England are receiving help from NHS mental health services. It is the first time this data has been recorded and it follows a reports that mental illness is soaring among women aged 16-24.

Children’s services are struggling to cope with demand. Research shows 28% of children referred for support in England – including some who had attempted suicide – received no help in 2015. Effective programmes are more important than ever and some have been started in schools and communities. Here are some of them.

Work in schools

There are a number of innovative programmes being run in schools to help young people with their mental health. Sacred Heart school in Tipton, for example, employed a happiness teacher last year: Samantha Rock. She got the title after the school linked up with the emotional resilience coach Jules Mitchell when a pupil’s parent died. Mitchell ran a happiness lab on a staff training day and encouraged teachers to start using the techniques on students. Rock teaches happiness, which is now part of the school’s curriculum. Her classes include mindfulness, dancing and a gratitude game.

Pupils dance at a primary school in Norfolk. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Elsewhere, with the help of the Young Minds charity, what has been dubbed the academic resilience approach is being encouraged at Lincroft middle school in Bedford. After getting training from the charity, staff have introduced resilience building activities across the 881-pupil school, and mental health lessons are included in personal, social, health and economic studies.

The school has a wellbeing officer, working two days a week, who has made a big difference quickly, with both teachers and students. It has also introduced a system to keep track of children who are vulnerable and/or have anxiety issues, making sure they get the help they need before things get too difficult.

A teacher at the school, Cat Johnson, said: “The main difference is that we’ve made mental health and vulnerability normal and acceptable in our school and made it clear we will help those struggling. Behaviour has greatly improved as a result and our school is happier.”

Apps and websites

There are now lots of apps and websites set up for children who most need help. Silent Secret, for example, is a social enterprise that provides a free app through which people age 11-19 can share their secrets and thoughts online in a safe and anonymous way. It also helps young people with similar issues talk online and support each other. It has had more than 58,000 users since it launched two years ago.

There are a variety of apps for children and young people aimed at helping their mental wellbeing. Photograph: Business Images/Rex/Shutterstock

Young Minds has launched a website called HeadMeds to help young people find out about mental health medication, asking the questions they might not want to ask parents or doctors. For example, a teenager might want to know whether alcohol can be consumed while using anti-depressants, or what the side effects might be. It includes stories of other young people who have taken medication and their experiences, offering general advice and guidance.

Parenting programmes

In the midlands of Ireland, in Longford and Westmeath, parents are going back to school to learn to help children with mental health issues, taking seminars and group sessions on various issues, including improving young people’s self-esteem or helping a child with ADHD.

It is part of the Triple P positive parenting programme, one of the world’s most extensively researched parenting interventions, developed at the University of Queensland, Australia, in 1982. It offers a range of programmes to parents, from a light touch, such as community seminars, to more targeted help, such as group seminars over eight weeks, and workshops. So if your child had depression you could go to a group talk about how to build confidence and self-esteem or you could meet a professional. It helps parents put strategies in place.

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The idea of the programme, however, is to prevent these issues from arising in the first place. Mark Penman, who works for Triple P in the UK, said: “The idea is to get in early … rather than it getting to the stage where more serious mental health issues develop.”

Studies have shown the effectiveness of Triple P in lowering anxiety. The Missed Opportunities report by the Centre for Mental Health published in June highlighted Ireland’s success, calling for more programmes like this across the UK. A paper published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies pointed out that studies of humans and primates have shown that anxious offspring are particularly sensitive to the impacts of parenting, citing a study by Suomi (1997).

Self-help groups

Community-led projects have also been popping up around England, offering support to young people. In Exeter, for example, one woman, Debbie Humberstone, saw a gap in services and set up The Project.

“This support group exists because of my family’s experience,” she said. “My daughter developed severe mental health issues at the age of 15 (severe depression and anxiety, an eating disorder and self harm). She was admitted to inpatient care when she became suicidal at the age of 16 and spent five months in an adolescent psychiatric unit. To cut a very long story short, she is now coming up for 23 and lives a fully independent life. Jess (my daughter) helped me set up The Project in 2013, based around the support we wished we had had as a family, and the support she wished she had had access to.”

The project offers peer support groups for young people and a monthly support group for parents. It also provides mental health awareness talks and workshops to break down the stigma and discrimination around mental health problems.

Humberstone said: “We are being contacted almost weekly by people in other parts of the country asking if we run similar support in their areas. In fact, we are currently working on a model to replicate our service, to help other groups and organisations who are looking to set up something like we have.

“Money is always the issue. We received Comic Relief funding last year, which provides around half our funding for the next three years. We get no statutory funding, despite young people being referred into our service by schools, GPs, youth offending teams, social services and mental health services themselves. The rest of our funding is from local groups and organisations, plus some smaller grants.”

• In the UK and Ireland the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

Help for children"s mental health, from apps to parenting classes

The Guardian view on maintaining match: workout classes and the class divide | Editorial

Even before excess fat was a feminist concern, society was seared by culinary divides on class lines – and the query of who could afford what substances was only ever element of the story. “A millionaire”, Orwell wrote in the 1930s, “may enjoy breakfasting on Ryvita biscuits and orange juice an unemployed guy doesn’t.” Wholesome living has usually been connected to self-confidence and status. At the top of the scale, there is ample scope to cultivate the virtue of deferring gratification at the bottom, there is a pressing require for low-cost palliatives for challenging lives lived, in Jarvis Cocker’s line, “with no that means or control”. Epidemiologists observe the consequences all over the place, from the class gradient in the data on who continues to smoke, to the tendency of the greater-off to do much more shopping in the fruit and veg aisle.

The spread of fitness across society used to be less skewed than the distribution of super-food items. Heaving, hauling and even standing had been, right after all, characteristics of manual and not desk-bound trades. And from the college playground on, the functioning class could compete on degree terms, as they could in few places, in sports activities this kind of as football: they dominated them as a result. Much more lately there have been depressing signs of physical exercise going the same way as smoking cessation and raw-meals diets. Exercising is becoming an echelon situation.

In 2010, Sir Michael Marmot’s evaluation for the government pointed to academic evidence that the less-educated and, specially, the workless exercised less adequately, and new information from diverse sources factors to a hardening of class lines. On the standard – and most medically critical – query of acquiring moving at least when a week, Sport England’s Active People Survey has now been working for a decade, and it registers a statistically substantial rise for the higher occupational grades above this time, and a substantial fall at the bottom end of the scale.

Even among these who are resolved to maintain match, new schisms are opening up. The fitness center industry is following the bifurcating trends of the supermarket sector. Cardlytics examination of bank accounts suggests that subs paid to the exercising equivalents of cut-price tag retailers Aldi and Lidl are increasing notably quick, with month-to-month investing up 66% in the previous year. Meanwhile, earlier in the British summertime, Fitness Very first announced that it could quickly bring the invitation-only, “gated” gyms for executives that it is creating in Singapore penthouses to London. In parallel, men and women with income to commit get pleasure from a burgeoning range of choices to attain the all-important spur to get themselves a lot more energetic – from a Fitbit on the wrist, to a former sergeant major yelling in the ear, courtesy of the boom in military-design fitness courses.

So how to tackle the physical exercise gap? 1st, stay away from the sort of vehicle-over-pedestrian preparing that ends up with America’s Centers for Condition Management obtaining to advocate “mall walking” as an affordable way to maintain fit. Second, get behind initiatives that can motivate the demotivated with no requiring them to shell out – the NHS’s Couch to 5K podcasts, and the Parkrun motion becoming two exceptional examples. Third and lastly, give some imagined to the great gulf in living situations itself. Until life gets more secure and much less penurious for Britain’s poor, edicts to start exercising will carry on to carry the dry taste of Ryvita biscuits.

The Guardian view on maintaining match: workout classes and the class divide | Editorial

First Middle School In Beijing To Halt Classes Due To Smog

Amid a week-extended attack of smog triggering the 2nd-highest pollution alert, Beijing saw its very first middle school halting lessons.

The Middle School Affiliated with Peking University suspended courses on Tuesday and Wednesday, advising students to keep indoors and download examine duties from the school’s on the web platform.

The school’s choice drew interest since it went towards the Trial Emergency Measures for Hefty Air Pollution in Beijing issued by the municipal government last yr. Middle schools, elementary school and kindergartens are suggested to cancel outside activities at the present pollution degree, but classes ought to carry on unless the alert is upgraded to “red,” a indicator that the most severe pollution is likely to persist. China National Radio reported that the district commission of schooling “sent in personnel” to demand that the college resume classes.

An unverified Wechat message circulating on the internet from a purported school teacher study:“Kids, your well being is the No.one priority. I think it is our want as effectively as responsibility to give you the last bit of warmth in this smoggy weather…we will not let you be wronged.”

Principal Wang Zheng of the Substantial School Affiliated with Peking University, which oversees the middle college, could not be immediately reached. Wang has the status of getting a controversial training reformer. From 2002 to 2010, he implemented bold reforms at Shenzhen Substantial School to maximize students’ freedom of choice in excess of programs and extracurricular activities, disrupting the standard electrical power dynamics between college students, teachers and college officials. His deep concerns for students’ nicely-becoming earned him friendships with several students and the nickname “Brother Zheng.” Some of his reform measures, along with his operate style, have carried in excess of from Shenzhen to his present position in Beijing.

A potential standoff between the college and the commission was avoided when a cold front lastly brought rain and fresh air to the city on Wednesday evening. PM two.five degree, the air top quality indicator, has dropped from the “hazardous” 400 to an “acceptable” 90 by Wednesday midnight.

Previously, Nanjing and Harbin were the only two cities in China where schools were suspended due to heavy pollution. The suspension sparked controversy at the time, as mother and father hustled to shuffle work schedules to care for the young children on the sudden day off. Other folks pointed out that the air top quality at house was not always far better than that in the classrooms.

A research published in the Lancet final 12 months argued that air pollution contributed to one.two million premature deaths in China in the yr 2010 alone. The Planet Overall health Organization, even so, has expressed uncertainty about the actual extent of affect that air pollution has on human wellness.

This round of smog is the longest-lasting in the previous yr, beating the prior record of 5 days in January of 2013 and affecting some 7 provinces. In Beijing, the air high quality index was close to 500 in the most polluted district. The severity of the pollution has prompted the newspaper title “Breath in the Very same Air, Share the Same Fate” for President Xi Jinping’s shock outdoor check out to a industrial hub in Beijing on Tuesday.

“The smog has not however dispersed, but the common secretary has already arrived,” said the official Weibo account of the Beijing government media division.

First Middle School In Beijing To Halt Classes Due To Smog