Introduction
Hello, my name is Catherine. I am a Clinical Psychologist working in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS).
For the last few years, my work has focused on supporting children and young people with care experience.
For a while now, the young people my team supports have told us that they dislike the word “LAAC” because it sounds like they are “lacking” something.
So we set out to change it!
How did we listen, act and respond?
Listen
In Summer 2023, I reached out to all of my colleagues in Buckinghamshire CAMHS to get ideas for a new team name. We had over 50 suggestions!
My team and I narrowed this list down to four names. Then, I got in touch with We Do Care to ask young people to help us decide the final name.
Carol in the We Do Care team spoke to a group of five young people at one of We Do Care’s Social Saturday events about the different name options.
The young people fed back that it was important for the purpose of the team to be clear to the young people they will work with, so including the phrase “Care Experienced” is essential. They also suggested not using the phrase “Mental Health” in the title as this may be unclear for children and younger people. Carol and the We Do Care team then sent this feedback over to me.
Act
Based on what the young people said, we chose the name “Adopted and Care Experience (ACE) Team”.
To make this change officially, we had to ask for approval from our senior managers. Because they know how important youth voice is, they were happy to make the change! Now, there are lots of admin things to change and lots of promotion to do to let everybody know about our new name.
Once I was able to confirm the new name, I updated Carol and Louise in the We Do Care team, who then updated the young people who had helped us. They also shared the link to our new webpage with the young people, so they can see the new name.
If you ever hear one of us say “LAAC team”, please make sure to tell us that we’ve got it wrong!
Impact and learning:
“I knew that changing the name of a whole team wasn’t going to be an easy thing to do, but I wanted to show others that it is possible.
By including the whole of CAMHS in the process I hoped to be able to show them that listening to and involving people who use our services is the best way of making changes.
I hope that others can now embark on similar projects with young people.”
– Catherine
“This looks like a great piece of work, listening to those we are here to serve 😊. Thank you to you and colleagues”
– Donna Clarke (Service Director Buckinghamshire)
Interested in getting involved?
If you are interested in helping to make CAMHS services better, please consider joining the CAMHS Article 12 forum!