Family therapy solutions clinic

What is solutions clinic?

The solutions clinic was developed by our CAMHS team as a way of supporting young people and their families into positive change.

The clinic uses a ‘brief solution-focused therapy’ model, which is a type of systemic family therapy. Family therapy aims to enable people in close relationships to help one another. This is the idea that every person affects and is affected by the people around them. That one person in the family cannot be understood in isolation from the rest.

In the solutions clinic this means that rather than working with just one person, we will work with you as a family.

Our conversations will focus more on solutions, rather than problems. We might spend time hearing about what is going well in your lives and of times when the problem is not around. These stories can help us together identify strengths and resources you already have, to help you move forward.

Before you come to your clinic appointment, it might be helpful for you to start thinking about what you would hope to achieve in family therapy. This will help us to support you in developing goals you might want to work towards and think about how you would know when you had achieved these goals.

What happens in sessions?

You will have more than 1 therapist working with you. This will include a trained family therapist, and practitioners who are trained in group therapy. There would be no more than 5 people in our team.

When you come to the solutions clinic, your therapist will meet you and will introduce you to the other team members. Your family will then talk with 1 or 2 therapists, whilst the other practitioners sit in another room and listen to the conversations. Then they will offer their reflections on what they have heard.

It is normal to feel a little nervous about talking in this kind of setting. However, families usually find this way of working useful, as you can hear a range of ideas and perspectives.

Remember you are the experts on your family and how it works, not us! The therapists meeting with you are there to support you in finding your own solutions to the problems you are bringing. We are not here to tell you what to do.

How long are family therapy sessions?

The family therapy sessions usually last for around 1 hour.

How many sessions will we need?

We will offer you between 1 and 6 sessions, depending your family’s needs and circumstances. Every family is different, so families need different amounts of time.

What times are appointments?

Beighton CAMHS solutions clinic are on Thursday afternoons at 2pm and 3.30pm.

Centenary CAMHS solutions clinic are on Wednesdays at 1.15pm.

Who has to come?

You can bring along whoever you would like to the sessions. We expect you might want to bring your immediate family members, and you are welcome to include anyone else who you feel is important to your family. As we continue working together, we might occasionally decide to only meet with part of the family. We would discuss this with you first.

Anything else?

Sometimes we may ask permission to record the sessions for training purposes. Recordings would be stored confidentially and destroyed under Data Protection rules within a specific time frame.  Recording these would not happen without your signed consent.

As part of a nationwide initiative to improve quality standards we use outcome measures in all clinical work. This just means we will ask for feedback about goals of therapy and your experiences. These outcome measures then helps us make sure we are meeting your needs in ways which are best for you.