At Adoption Focus we believe in supporting the mental health of our adopters, their children, and our staff team.
During our adoption preparation training, much of the focus is on early-life trauma and its impact on a child’s brain development. From the outset, we discuss ways in which adopters can support their children and build trust to increase their sense of security.
Our Ofsted ‘Outstanding’-rated post-adoption support is always available to our adoptive families, whenever it’s needed, providing expert advice, methods for dealing with parents’ and children’s problems and invaluable peer support. In this last, challenging year, this support has been called upon more than ever and we moved very quickly to deliver our services online to ensure that this support has continued seamlessly.
As with everyone else, our staff have also been subjected to unprecedented upheaval to routines as a result of the pandemic. We know our team value the support they receive from colleagues and we’ve been careful to ensure that this hasn’t been lost while we’ve been working at home. We encourage staff to stay in contact with each other for informal chats and online social events, as well as ensuring that communication between staff and managers is frequent and positive and online team meetings and supervision take place regularly. In addition, we have scheduled afternoon closures at points during the pandemic to allow the team to have an extended weekend to recharge and we have provided access for staff to an independent counselling service.
Benjamin James, Chairperson of Trustees said, “It is extremely important that we are all aware, not only of our own mental health, but the health of our team and our beneficiaries. The trustees work hard to ensure that our support to beneficiaries in all areas, including mental health, meets our Ofsted Outstanding ranking. We believe that the “mental health” days during the last year which we have added to ensure regular breaks from work have been a huge benefit to the team.”
If you are an Adoption Focus adopter or are going through the adoption process with us and would like to access our support, please get in touch.