RACHAL MINCHINTON COLUMNIST
THE past five months have been hugely testing for us all, and for key workers such as Hafal’s frontline staff, the lockdown has been especially challenging.
Hafal is a mental health charity delivering vital support across the whole of Wales. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic our staff and volunteers have had to go beyond the call of duty and work tirelessly – and often creatively – to deliver our services.
While it has been a difficult task, one thing we have learned from lockdown is what a kind and caring bunch we are in Wales. The fundraising that has gone on over the past months to support Hafal’s work has been truly inspiring!
Take, for example, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) which you will have heard a lot about on the news recently.
We cannot emphasise how important it has been to source masks, gloves and other protective equipment so that we can deliver our service.
When you have a mental illness, it is vitally important to have human contact, and PPE has enabled us to deliver services in person. This faceto-face support has been beneficial to so many of our clients – even a lifeline in some cases.
Some of our clients are very vulnerable children and young people – maintaining our contact with this client group has been absolutely crucial. And at our hospital and housing projects, PPE has been essential in enabling us to deliver our service to those who depend on our support.
That’s why we are so very grateful to everyone – individuals, organisations and grant-awarding trusts – for donating no less than £65,000 towards PPE for our frontline workers over the past five months. This might sound like a lot of money – and it is, but it reflects how much it has cost us to keep our staff and clients safe during this worrying time.
We’ve also had wonderful support from community groups who have sourced and supplied donations of masks, gloves and other PPE themselves and donated them to us. Its been so wonderful to feel that we’re working as one community, across Wales, to help keep people safe.
I want to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to everyone who has donated PPE or gone on a virtual trek, bungee-jumped, cycled or done any number of other things to raise money for our work during lockdown! Without your support we would not have been able to deliver our services during the pandemic.
Despite the continuing generosity of fundraising individuals and groups, and grant-awarding trusts, Hafal is facing a difficult future. We worry about our ongoing funding, particularly given the current recession and the pressure on public funds. We know that the Welsh public will continue to be as generous as they can be to the causes they care about, and we are so grateful to them for their ongoing support.
To Hafal’s funders – local authorities, health boards and other organisations across Wales who commission our services – I want to say this: Please remember the invaluable role charities play in communities across Wales. We want to continue to work in partnership with you, to help relieve the pressure on your services and support the people who need us most. Working together has never been more important.
As we hopefully begin to move on from the pandemic in the coming months and years, not only will there be increased pressure on the NHS to “catch up” with delivering its health services to patients whose treatment has been delayed; there will also be an increased pressure on mental health services as a result of lockdown.
That’s because many people have seen their mental health support reduced considerably during lockdown, and the consequences for their mental health have been, and will continue to be, dire.
Furthermore, we are also witnessing the mental health effects of the pandemic following a prolonged period of anxiety, loneliness and isolation for many.
Charities like Hafal provide a high-quality, high-value and recovery-focused service to clients. In many cases, our support keeps people out of hospital. Cutting funding to support services such as ours is a false economy – it stores up even more problems for the future and creates ongoing problems for an already overstretched NHS.
Moving forward, we need well-resourced community services which can support the work of the NHS, and whose value is recognised. Let’s make this part of the “new normal” as we emerge from Covid.
■ Rachal Minchinton is Head of Opportunity Management at Hafal