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Date issued: August 2018

For review: August 2020

Ref: D-301/child health/EL/Visiting a Wellbeing practitioner parents

PDF:  CWP leaflet parents [pdf] 318KB

 

A Leaflet for Parents

What is a Children and Young People’s Wellbeing Practitioner (CWP)?

The CWP works alongside the Psychology team at the CDC and supports young people, or their parents, with programs based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

CBT explores how our thoughts, feelings and behaviours all affect each other. The Wellbeing Practitioner will help your child to gain some understanding of this. Your child will learn about difficult feelings and how to manage them.

A CWP can also work directly with parents, supporting them to manage their child’s behaviour through discussing parenting skills or through learning some CBT themselves to use at home with their child.

Why might your child see a CWP?

Children that are already registered with another practitioner at the CDC can see the Wellbeing Practitioner for many reasons. For example if they:

• Have worries and fears

• Feel sad or unhappy
• Feel agitated or angry
• Find it hard to get along with people or have difficulties at school Parents can also work directly with the CWP

What happens in the first meeting?

The first meeting is called an ‘assessment’. The aim of this meeting is to hear about the difficulties and concerns from the perspective of you and your child. It is also a chance to get to know you and your family. We would like it to be as relaxed and comfortable as possible and this will be done through talking and asking lots of questions. We will also take some notes during this meeting. The first appointment usually lasts about an hour.

If you feel it may be difficult for you to talk in front of your child then you may choose to come on your own to this first appointment.

What happens at the end of the first meeting?

Together, we agree on a plan of how best to help you and your child. This may involve:

• Arranging sessions with you and/or your child (we will usually meet for about 6-8 sessions)
• With your permission, it can also be helpful to involve other people who know you, for example the school
• You might decide that there is no need to meet again
• We might suggest another service that is better suited to your child’s/family’s needs

It is important to note that we can only help your child if they want to work with us.

Are discussions with the CWP confidential?

Wellbeing Practitioners have strict rules about confidentiality. We have weekly supervision to discuss all cases with a Psychologist at the CDC as an important part of our role. Apart from this we do not discuss your child’s problem with anyone other than the doctor and medical team who referred you. It is important for you to know that we will be writing about our appointments in shared notes which will be available to other health professionals seeing your child. If there is something you do not want us to share within this team, just let us know and we can discuss this.

We have a responsibility to protect children from harm, and are legally bound to share any information regarding children at risk of abuse with relevant agencies.

We really look forward to meeting you and your child