Aspire services

Who are Aspire?

Aspire is led by Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Dr. Krissie Ivings. Krissie has over 25 years CAMHS experience and is supported by an ADOS trained Clinical Nurse Specialist who has over 30 years + CAMHS experience. Together they wrote ASD and Attachment pathways and protocols for NHS Services, and they are particularly skilled and disentangling neuro-developmental issues from those rooted in emotional distress and attachment.

Aspire employs psychologists and therapists with a wide range of therapeutic skills and lived experiences, to ensure that they offer a rapid, empathic, holistic and effective support.

Therapeutic Interventions

Therapists are skilled in:

Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy
Dialectical Behaviour therapy
Mindfulness- based Approaches
EMDR
Attachment-focussed Interventions
Play-based Interventions
Motivational Interviewing
Life Coaching
Sensory Intervention
Counselling
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy

What do Aspire do?

The primary focus of Aspire is with Looked After Children. They work in partnership with care homes to create the best possible therapeutic support to vulnerable, damaged, distressed children and young adults living in residential therapeutic placements. They believe that their job is to equip Looked After Children for successful, happy adult lives.

Aspire also offer a comprehensive range of specialist assessments, mental health interventions and wellbeing services.

Aspire offers highly skilled Consultant led therapeutic services to all children placed in care. All of our work is rooted in the Royal College of Psychiatry Core standards for children in therapeutic residential placements.

Our model of practice is centred around the principle of offering psychologically informed care via care home staff, alongside access to individual therapeutic support. Homes we support commit to being trained in our model, and to implementing it in practice. They have also committed to working in a formulation driven, psychologically informed way.

We have demonstrated ‘Proof of Concept’ of our approach through a series of case studies. Aspire are now taking part in a wider ‘Proof of Concept’ study, as part of a large national NHSE and HEE project: Youth Intensive Psychological Practitioners Pilot Study. We are the only non-NHS site and the only one working with LAC.

Most young people will be appropriate for our Standard package. This offers skilled assessment, evidence based psychological therapies and regular staff consultation within an overall therapeutic frame-work. As families often remain important to children, but can both enhance or undermine placements we work with families as standard. We aim to promote positive contact and limit harm, while also offering families support in their own right. We also offer meeting attendance and increased multi-agency liaison in recognition that children with complex needs require a coherent multi-agency response.

A small number of children showing higher levels of risk may require our Enhanced package with additional risk support. These would be children who require on-going risk assessment and risk management in order to preserve a placement. In this package Aspire takes the lead for risk assessment and management in liaison with CAMHS and other agencies. Within this package, Aspire will also be far more accessible, as we recognise that risk management requires rapid accessibility and increased responsiveness. This package is likely to be used only in cases where the alternative is likely to be placement breakdown, hospital admission or a secure placement. Details of each package are listed below:

For those children who have no contact with families, or where contact is entirely unproblematic, we offer a basic package which removes the family support element

TRAINING

Research has shown that children's outcomes and staff performance and morale are considerably enhanced when homes embed a therapeutic model.

Aspire offer training in SPIRAL with introductory days to help care settings consider how SPIRAL can work for them, through to full implementation and ongoing support in embedding the model within each unique setting.

ASSESSMENT

Aspire offers:

Screenings
Specialist ASD Assessments
Trauma & Attachment informed Neuro-developmental assessments
Post Assessments
Post diagnostic support and interventions for Schools and Families

Assessments include interviews with parents, observations across a range of settings, Psychometric Measures, Sensory Assessments, Engagement with the children & young people and use of clinical tools, such as the ADOS. Aspires' assessments result in a detailed report, with clear recommendations, and they can offer on-going support on request.