If you’re a professional in primary healthcare, NHS Crisis Resolution Team , local authority support services, counsellor at TalkWorks or any voluntary sector we may be able to support your client.
Your work, whether as a professional clinician or as a volunteer, brings you into regular contact with vulnerable individuals who could benefit from additional emotional support.
You may know that you can’t afford each person the time and the level of support that you would like to give them.
Your patients, your callers, your “clients”?
They may be people who are in regular need of emotional support or they may be experiencing tough times following a crisis event.
Our volunteers ?
We are all local to Barnstaple and provide a fully trained listening service to local people who are in need of additional emotional support. Because we are not at the sharp end all of the time, we work with you, our local professionals and other voluntary organisations. You identify clients and patients who are in need of additional support and with their consent, you allow us to provide them with the time and space that they need.
How we help you to help them ?
If you contact us via [email protected] we will explain how we can work together to help support vulnerable people that you identify in the community. We will give you access to a secure https online form so that you can send details in confidence to Samaritans in Barnstaple.
On each form, we ask for your name and your location, and provided you have your “client’s” consent, their first name, telephone number, and the best time to call. We then ring them at a time that suits them. .
Alternatively, you receive the number of an answer-phone where, in response to prompts, you can leave the same information.
Why local partners working with local Samaritan volunteers to support local people?
We make most difference if we focus accurately on those with highest risk and at moments when they are likely to feel most vulnerable. We will not wait for them to come to us. Similarly, we gain most leverage if we cooperate with partners whose full-time activity is dedicated to the most vulnerable in our society and who can help us identify when they are at a low ebb. You may be closer to the sharp end than we are.
Please contact Barnstaple Samaritans at [email protected] and we will get back to you to consider how best your organisation can work with us in partnership.