Havering Refugee & Asylum Seeker Mental Health & Wellbeing Outreach Service

This is not an invitation to tender. Havering currently has circa 200 Ukrainian Refugees, around half of whom are women and half of whom are children. There are also circa 250 asylum seekers housed within a contingency hotel, all of which are adult males. One of the priority health needs for this cohort, is the provision of a mental health and wellbeing support service. This cohort tends to display symptoms of PTSD, depression and anxiety at levels far greater than the general population. This is often due to the severe trauma they have experienced or witnessed before arriving in the UK but can sometimes be due to what they experience whilst here. Asylum seekers and refugees are some of the poorest and most marginalised in society, arriving in a new country and navigating the healthcare landscape can be challenging, being able to travel to health & wellbeing services located throughout the borough can become an impossible ask for many as they simply do not have the financial means to get to all available services. There is also a significant lack of understanding and trust in mental health services amongst this cohort and a subsequent reluctance to seek mental health support. This is principally due to how mental health is often perceived in their countries of origin, which tends to still elicit a fearful response when reference is made to referring into our mental health services. This has led to extremely poor uptake and engagement with existing mental health services amongst asylum seekers and refugees. A number of asylum seekers have indicated that they also fear seeking such support may negatively impact their asylum applications. Unlike neighbouring boroughs, such as Redbridge and Waltham Forest, Havering does not have a mental health service that is bespoke for refugees. Like most London boroughs, we are seeing an increase in the number of asylum seekers and refugees. A specialist asylum seeker and refugee mental health service is therefore needed to provide parity between Havering and neighbouring boroughs, but also, the skilled expertise of clinical psychologists that are trained to deal with such cases is a current gap in service provision for Havering. Having an outreach element is vitally important to the service we are looking to launch, as we want our clinical psychologists to be on site, operating from locations that are easiest for asylum seekers and refugees to access. This removes the transport barriers that currently act as blockers to accessing wider mental health services, allows clinicians to be seen to build trust and rapport with our asylum seekers and refugees, so that they feel better able to access services and can better understand the support available. It will be important that any potential provider has: • clinical psychologists that are appropriately trained to deal with mental health issues expressed by both adult and children asylum seekers and refugees. • Be willing to operate an outreach model, and provide 1 to 1 and group therapy sessions on site from locations that are easy to access for our asylum seeker and refugee population • Have access to interpreters from a broad range of languages • Access patient records to ensure full visibility of a patients history • Have knowledge of existing mental health services that are available for Havering residents The project will operate initially as a pilot for a minimum of 12 months If this is a service you are interested in potentially providing, then please complete the feedback form which provides you with the opportunity to answer and ask questions.