Welcome to our next Weekly Bulletin. If you would like us to include something on our weekly news, please get in touch by emailing [email protected].
Unite For Recovery is Live
Only a few days left of April, which means we’re just about ready to start walking around the world.
If you haven’t already heard, we’re (virtually) gathering our recovery community, including YOU. And we’re walking a grand total of 24,901 miles in May to raise funds which will enable us to continue to support people in recovery and their loved ones to live a more fulfilling and balanced life.
Sign up here and join us to Unite for Recovery
1000th Meeting
UKSR registers its 1000th peer led mutual aid meeting!
We currently register 4 different types of SMART meeting:
- Service led a) ‘open’ (anyone can attend local to the service) or b) ‘closed’ (only the patients/clients registered with the service can attend).
- Volunteer led a) ‘open’ (anyone can attend from anywhere) or b) ‘closed’ (they volunteer for a service and offer the meetings to other service users).
- UKSR has this month registered it’s 1000th peer volunteer led open meeting since we registered as UKSR in 2015. Number 2 type a and the meeting was in Edinburgh at a CGL site called Westhales.
These are the ‘open door’ meetings available to anyone to attend anytime that are not service led. If the pandemic didn’t happen we would have reached this number 2 years ago. So that’s 1000 open mutual aid meetings over 8 years all ran by peer volunteers in the community. That’s 1500 hours of peer led mutual aid and If we extrapolate an average of 10 attendees per meeting that’s 15000 hours of mutual aid delivered by the community supporting itself.
NHIR Research project- can you help?
The study is service development, to create integrated and holistic support for older people with alcohol and mental health problems in the North East and North Cumbria.
As part of this, they are looking to conduct confidential interviews with:
– people aged 55+ who’ve had alcohol and mental health problems at some point in the past 5 years.
-friends and family who provide informal support to the above group
-practitioners/support workers who provide formal support to the above group.
These interviews are to help understand the support needs of the over 55s and their families, their experiences, support needs, and how we can help them better in our region through commissioning/new initiatives and make sure nobody falls between service gaps during their recovery. Taking part would involve an hour-long confidential interview with Beth or Deepti alongside one of their peer researchers with lived experience, and participants get a £25 shopping voucher in thanks.
You can help by:
i) sharing the flyers with study information and the contact details to service users aged 55+/family and friends/ other practitioners
ii) giving the study information sheets to service users aged 55+/family and friends/ other practitioners
They’d be happy to send you print outs/recruitment packs if this would be helpful. They can also talk about this to any groups that might include people who might be interested in taking part in this study.
New Meetings
New Weekly Online Family and Friends Meeting, London
New Weekly SMART Recovery Meeting, Lanark
New Weekly SMART Recovery Meeting, Sheffield