Mental Health Marketplace event

We recently held our first Mental Health Marketplace event over the road from our hospital at Weston Park Museum. The aim of the event was to provide colleagues with an opportunity to learn more, to meet with professionals, and to become more empowered around supporting children and young people experiencing mental health challenges.

The event was organised by Wendy Hart, a Continual Professional Development Facilitator from our Education Learning Organisation and Development (ELOD) team, and Tom Sweeney who is one of our mental health nurses.
Throughout the day there were two training sessions for colleagues to attend – one led by Tom around developing skills to help support patients with mental health conditions in acute settings, and another session led by South Yorkshire Eating Disorder Association (SYEDA) focusing on an introduction to eating disorders.

As well as the training sessions there was a drop-in marketplace with lots of organisations from across the city, including SYEDA, Chilypep, Papyrus, and Sheffield Mind.

Wendy said: “We’ve had some really brilliant feedback from colleagues about this event and we’re hoping to hold another one in the summer. Most of the attendees were nursing and Allied Health Professionals (AHP) colleagues, but we were also really pleased to see lots of other teams across Sheffield Children’s represented at the event. We’re meeting more children and young people with mental health challenges in our work and this event was all about empowering colleagues and helping them to be able to support our children and young people.

“Collaborating with community organisations is a crucial part of this work as we often signpost families on to other support that is available in the city – we’re very thankful to work with teams in the community and to partner with them on important events like this.”

We’re looking forward to hosting more events like this for colleagues in the future.