On 05/02/2014 and 04/03/2014 Exchange House National Travellers Suicide Awareness Project delivered two three hour workshops to students of Crosscare/National University Ireland Maynooth Youth Studies students.

The first workshop focused on self-care in the caring profession and nineteen students attended the workshop. In the first half of the workshop, we looked at the meaning of self-care and the current self-care skills within the group. The group completed a self-care assessment and used the self-care pie chart to explore the balance in their lives and identify areas for attention.

For the second half of the workshop, we explored the idea of compassion fatigue – stress resulting from care giving and developed skills to prevent compassion fatigue. We completed the workshop be developing individual self-care plans using the learning and tools from the workshop.

Student evaluation rated the workshop as either definitely or mostly useful to their work and mentioned the self-care assessment as a really useful tool.

The second workshop delivered by NTSAP focused on working with mental health as youth worker and sixteen students attended. This was a very interactive training in which the students were asked to imagine being a young person. We asked the group to think how mental health affects young people who are LGBT, a Traveller, have learning difficulties or have history of criminal offences. The training highlighted to the students certain difficulties youths may face and how their mental health can be affected. We looked at tools and resources available to youth workers to help young people struggling with their mental health.

Student evaluation rated the workshop as either definitely or mostly useful to their work and the majority of students mentioned that they would have liked more time in this workshop.

NTSAP is available to deliver these workshops to other organisations. If you would like more information on the training or to request one or both of the workshops, please contact Patricia Mc Keever at ntsap@exchangehouse.ie or 087 792 5387.