Campaigning
Women’s Mental Health Network
Wish has a strong membership of women with experience of mental distress and the mental health and/or criminal justice system, who already input to Wish's campaigning. As a user led organisation, we work to ensure women’s voices are heard at a local and national policy level to promote a women-centred approach to treatment and care.
To take this campaign forward, Wish has established a Women’s Mental Health Network to develop an evidence base of areas where policy is not applied, and examples of good practice too. We aim to establish a clear, coherent and informed channel of communication between women who use services and policy makers. This will support the process of turning fully endorsed policy into practice, and reversing the trend that ‘one size fits all’ in terms of gender, mental health and advocacy.
Wish is inviting mental health and women's organisations, as well as individuals with experience of mental distress, to join our network and support our Why Gender Matters campaign. We need to form a strong collective voice to not only influence policy change, but to ensure accountability in implementing policy at a local level.
Our ‘Why Gender Matters?’Campaign
This campaign promotes working together to develop women-centred practice in secure settings and the community. There is a growing emphasis on gender policy and adopting a more holistic approach, but changing a culture is difficult. Wish is campaigning to unite all stakeholders to move towards delivering effective, integrated women-centred services, bringing service provision in line with the Gender Equality Duty.
In response to research findings, and the acknowledgement by practitioners of the difficulty faced by staff of putting gender policy into practice in mental health settings, Wish has developed a training and consultancy programme to support this process. Please get in touch to discuss how we can work with you on this issue.
What is a Women-Centred Approach?
- Empowering women to be at the centre of their individual treatment and care
- Relationship-building as a lynchpin – providing gender specific services isn’t enough if women don’t have trust or confidence in the delivery
- Long-term benefits of working intensively with women across their journey through the system and back into the community
- Proper monitoring of services by experts
- Ensuring gender impact assessments feed into service provision
Working Together For Change
Real change can only happen if all stakeholders work together. Commissioners, service providers, courts and prisons, mental health organisations, women’s groups and individual women all have an important role to play. Change can only happen if we are all on the same page when it comes to turning policy into reality. We must work in a collaborative way to ensure the best possible outcome.
How You Can Help
- Become a Wish member
- Get in touch with us about sharing your experience of service delivery and to discuss pooling any evidence you may yourself have collated as an organisation. This will be possible through the website in the near future.
- Speak to us about adopting a gender-specific advocacy model in your organisation, partnering with us on commissions, or receiving our training and consultancy programme