MWI thanks participants for successful community event

Tuesday 23 January 2018: Bermuda Hospitals Board (BHB) today thanks everyone who attended the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute (MWI) Community Event at Pier Six on Thursday 18 January. About 70 attendees participated in a series of conversations with MWI staff regarding seven projects to improve mental health, child & adolescent, intellectual (previously learning) disability and substance abuse services.

BHB Chief Operating Officer R Scott Pearman comments: “Despite the cold, wet and windy weather outside, there was great engagement, enthusiasm and generosity in sharing ideas, perspectives and solutions. This is a new way of working for us at BHB. We started last year with an open space event where the community set the agenda to talk about what they thought BHB needed to do to ‘get it right’.  A number of ideas were generated and over the last year BHB has made changes and improvements – from extending visiting hours for acute patients, working with pastoral staff to support patients’ spiritual needs, and working on a clinical services plan that will help define BHB’s future role. Last night’s event focused on MWI services, and a number of projects directly related to feedback from last year’s conversation.”

Projects discussed were: addressing stigma associated with mental illness, establishing a ‘Club House’ in Hamilton, establishing supervised community mental health group homes, the teen life skills programme, expanding assertive outreach to schools, intellectual disability engagement and education/outreach for substance abuse.

Mr Pearman concludes: “Thursday’s event took the process a step further than last year: inviting the community to be a part of real projects to improve services. Attendees included service providers, community partners, BHB staff, Board members, civil servants, service users, and families of service users. It is unusual to have this diverse cross section entering into conversation with each other in real time to make improvements – and this is the strength of the process. MWI staff who led project conversations now have a wealth of perspectives, ideas and thoughts that will improve how we understand the projects and what they can achieve for our community.

“Thank you once more to everyone who came together, connected and shared. We are grateful for all you brought to the event, every project host learnt something that will directly enhance their work and we will be sharing our progress and all the gathered feedback as part of our ongoing process.”

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