Jane Cooke, the Senior Officer Mental Health at PAVO, recently left to take up a new post in Llandrindod Wells with the arts charity Celf o Gwmpas.

With Jane’s departure, PAVO’s senior management have looked at the opportunity to draw Health, Social Care and Mental Health together in way that reflects more the nature of working holistically with people’s health and wellbeing in 2018. As a result, PAVO has combined our previous Health and Social Care team with our mental health information, engagement and participation provision, and we now have a new team called the “Health and Wellbeing” team. We are closely aligned with PAVO’s Community Connectors so we provide both a central hub and community focus for our Health and Wellbeing services.

There are three strands to our work: Information, Engagement (with the Third Sector, statutory partners including Welsh Government, locally, regionally and nationally) and Participation (involving members of the public). Freda Lacey, our Senior Officer for Health and Social Care, has now taken on the leadership of this new combined team.

We are strengthening the provision of our support in providing Information and opening up new dialogue opportunities across Health and Wellbeing (including specifically for mental health) through the use of webinars, podcasts, social media and printed information, engagement with the Sector across various networks and communities of interest, and ensuring the Sector is informed about cross cutting themes and opportunities in regards to commissioning, navigating the changing landscape in the provision of public services and sharing best practice.

We will continue to provide specific support to members of the public, in marketing, recruiting and supporting people to participate in a wide variety of ways, contributing their voice to strategic policy changes/development, participating on management boards such as with the Regional Partnership Board and Mental Health Planning and Delivery Partnership Board, in addition to other co-production opportunities and we are ensuring that we capture issues and concerns from our Community Connectors and from people in our Community Participation Networks and seek to resolve these with our statutory and voluntary sector partners.

Our successful Comic Relief project associated with mental health will continue to deliver specific initiatives in the short term (we are discussing next steps with partners) particularly completing some key legacies such as creating and distributing an Iris Prize Film on specific Powys LGBTQ+ experiences. We are hoping this will be premiered in October at a community event and will also be linked with the launch of a Sexual Health service in Powys.

We will be recruiting two new people into the team shortly to help support the provision of information and engagement, particularly as a result of Jane’s departure, and we look forward to this new chapter in our supporting people in Powys.

If you have any specific questions about the new team and/or our work, please contact Freda Lacey, Senior Officer Health and Wellbeing on 01597 822191 or another member of the team.