Extended Hours


The mental health sector is experiencing an unprecedented surge in demand. To meet this surge additional funding has been made available for mental health service providers to extend the hours of service provision to include evenings and/or weekends for around three to four months.

Alongside the funding is a collaborative approach to dealing with the practicalities such as safe-guarding and supervision that enables more services and projects to operate evenings and weekends.

The extended hours initiative will enable more people in need to access support, and at a time that suits them.

Funded organisations are able to increase/extend existing staff to cover the addtional hours, or they can source more frontline capacity through our staff bank, avoiding the time, cost and administration usually associated with staff recruitment.

Funded Organisations

See below a list of the funded organisations and the work they are able to do through the Mental Health Surge programme.

Anthony Seddon Fund (ASF): increased staff time and are open for two evenings each week. This increase in capacity will allow for more structured bereavement groups for adults and children and young people to take place. Following each session there is informal support including post group work ground, informal social prescribing and signposting. They are also holding peer groups in the evening. 

Creative Living Centre: has out of hours support calls and increased evening and weekend provision to provide more adult counselling sessions. 

Diversity Matters North West (DMNW): in partnership with Leap have extended their service to two days per week to 5:00 to 8:00pm. They provide Peer Support and Befriending sessions. 

Europia: have an out of service Monday to Friday from 4:00 to 7:00pm and on Saturday 10:00am to 2:00pm. They provide an out of hours’ mental health helpline. The helpline will have the option to choose to speak with Polish, Lithuanian/Russian and Romanian mental health practitioners. Europia provides one-to-one in depth adult counselling sessions in Polish, Romanian, Russian/Lithuanian. They run different peer support groups on Saturdays including peer to peer support group in English for EU nationals, peer to peer support group in Polish for women and peer to peer support groups for men led by a male Polish community development worker and female Polish therapist.

Jewish Action for Mental Health: are providing out of hours counselling and therapy. They also offer group work opportunities. 

LEAP (St Peter’s Partnerships): extended their children and young people and family support services to include Saturdays. 

LGBT Foundation: are assessing people in extended hours’ delivery, increasing weekend provision delivering counselling on Saturdays and Sundays, and increasing capacity of staff to support their helpline in the evenings.

Multicultural Resource Centre: provides out of hours’ mental health support for people from the Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME*) community. This will be provided in various languages either over the phone or online. They will be providing counselling, bereavement support, guided self-help, mindfulness, social prescribing, intervention and Covid-19 vaccine support. 

Rochdale and District Mind: increased their evening opening times for adult counselling to include a Thursday evening in addition to their Tuesday evening session. 

Tameside, Oldham and Glossop Mind: will increase evening opening time for adult counselling Wednesday and Thursday to 8:00pm and Saturdays 10:00am until 12:00pm.   

Manchester Settlement: provides mental health support and outreach support to Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Kurdish clients and bilingual mental health support.

The Pankhurst Trust: offers therapeutic support for survivors of Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse counselling, and group work/support. Their services will now include support in the evenings Monday to Friday.

The staff bank is managed by GMCVO and any VCSE mental health service providers or practitioners with capacity are encouraged to join (see below).

*GMCVO uses the BAME abbreviation as we believe it is widely understood, but we acknowledge many feel this term is inadequate and limiting. We are therefore currently reviewing of our use of the term. Our principle is to refer to individuals, organisations or networks by the terminology they themselves prefer.

How to get involved?

If you, or a member of your staff would like to support this work and have capacity that you would like to offer the bank, please let us know by completing this form  JOIN THE BANK 

 

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