Working in the Gardener Unit

The Gardener Unit is a ten-bed medium secure inpatient. We are the highest-level security for Tier 4 inpatient Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and one of only five specialist adolescent medium secure units across the country. We provide assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation for young people who could not otherwise safely receive this in a non-secure hospital or custody setting. These are often young people with complex histories of survival, attachment, disruption and trauma who have been passed between and within systems. They frequently have multiple, persistent, and severe needs that struggle to respond or maintain progress with traditional regime and interventions.

At the Gardener Unit we recognise the unique and diverse needs of young people and provide quality, individualised care and support. We take pride in being recovery-oriented with recovery being client-centred. The Gardener Unit provides expert assessments of the link between a young person’s mental illness and their high-risk behaviours towards self or others. We are a friendly, well-resourced and highly experienced team made up of a mixture of disciplines including Psychiatry, Nursing, Clinical Psychology, Creative Therapies, Family Therapy, Occupational Therapy and Speech and Language Therapy.

Interagency working is promoted and we work closely with social care and youth offending services to facilitate thinking around care and risk management. The team work to a therapeutic model based on principles of child development and attachment that acknowledges the importance of relationships and the key role of staff as agents of change. The service is trauma-informed, and we incorporate this into our everyday care, seeking to build our young people’s strengths and attachment with the aim of reducing the likelihood that they will engage in high-risk and anti-social behaviour in the future.

The service aims to maximise young people’s hope about their future, enabling them to develop safe independent living and promoting opportunities for positive achievement. Within the unit we have Cloughside College who work closely with our young people, providing education at GCSE and A-Level. Along with providing learning, Cloughside College work closely with the ward to deliver regular events to provide normative experiences the young people would otherwise miss out on, for example, summer BBQ’s, Christmas markets and summer fairs. We are driven to continuously improve and invest in our service and team.

An exciting new development has been our two-day Gardener Unit induction which focuses on the development of specialist forensic knowledge and skills. Furthermore, all staff are provided with additional training in PACE (person-centred assessment, care planning and evaluation), a therapeutic approach that helps young people to develop secure relationships with adults. It is a way of thinking, feeling, communicating, and behaving, that supports our young people to feel safe. We are committed to supporting our newly qualified staff and have developed an in-depth Preceptorship course with additional support from the services Practice Nurse Educator, as well as a rolling band 5 development programme, to help Preceptorship Nurses to develop confidence in their practice.