A NEW initiative which supports people in their recovery from mental health issues has been launched in Redditch as part of a newly re-designed service.

During 2015 Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust, which provides the majority of mental health services across the county, brought together service users, staff and other stakeholders to re-design its vocational services.

These provide activities for people who need support to re-build their confidence, or to gain new skills to equip them for future work, volunteering or education following a mental health illness.

The service had been previously run out of three centres - Shrub Hill Workshop in Worcester, Orchard Place Workshop in Redditch and Link Nurseries in Powick - but in April the newly re-designed service, called New Opportunities Worcestershire, went live.

This moved it to more of an outreach format, with just one centre and many more groups and activities run across the county in partnership with local voluntary and community organisations. This will increase options for more people to access these types of activities than would have been possible previously.

One of the new outreach projects takes place on Monday and Wednesday at the Old Needleworks in Redditch where trust staff will support a woodwork programme for those people who are recovering from mental health conditions. The project is run alongside Age UK which is delivering an initiative called Men in Sheds.

Pete Jordan, service manager for the trust’s Employment and Reablement Service, said: “We are really excited about the new links and opportunities the new model will create and the course being run at the Old Needleworks is a really good example of this.

“We know that learning a new skill and having a focus can be very effective in helping people to recover so we’re delighted to be working with colleagues at the Old Needleworks and look forward to seeing more people benefit from this partnership.”

The new service will have one centre, initially Shrub Hill Workshop, which will continue to provide arts and construction activities as well as support for people looking to sharpen up their IT skills. Other outreach community activities which have commenced include horticultural projects based at the Princess of Wales Community Hospital, Bromsgrove and the Fairfield Centre in Worcester. Further activities will commence in venues across Worcestershire and will grow to meet demand over the next months.

The activities are only available for those people who are already receiving secondary mental health services from Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust.