This campaign has now closed

Although there is growing recognition that disfigurement can lead to serious emotional and psychological difficulties, and to social isolation, there is still little or no specialist help available through the NHS. While continuing to offer practical support services to hundreds of people with disfigurements each year, Changing Faces is working to bring about change so that specialist psycho-social support becomes routinely available locally through the statutory services.

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Categories

  • Health/Wellbeing Health/​Wellbeing
  • Beneficiaries

    • Women & Girls Women & Girls
    • Other Other

    Situation

    540,000 children, young people and adults in the UK are estimated to have a significant facial disfigurement – one in every 111 people. Medical and surgical treatments are increasingly sophisticated for these conditions, but they can rarely restore ‘normal’ appearance. Although there is a growing recognition that serious problems around self-confidence, self-esteem and social isolation can result from disfigurement, there is still little or no access to specialist advice, information and support through the statutory services. Changing Faces runs three inter-related programmes to support and represent the needs of people with disfigurements. Our work is underpinned by academic research evidence, ongoing evaluation and input from our users. Last year, Changing Faces’ Adult Service (part of our Individuals Programme) handled over 1,000 enquiries from men and women seeking help to handle the daily challenge of living with a disfigurement. Our specialists are highly experienced psychologists/psychotherapists and counsellors and, at the heart of their work, is the one-to-one counselling and advice we make available to anyone – a person with a disfigurement or their partner/family – over the age of 18 who contacts us. This service is backed up by a range of self-help guides which can be downloaded, free of charge, from our website and we also run day-long confidence-building workshops for small groups. Support is available to clients who may be experiencing discrimination at work or in their everyday lives. Alongside this practical service, Advisers in our Professionals Programme are working to bring about systemic change: providing expert advice and specialised training to the NHS, developing links with professional associations and representative bodies, and working to influence the delivery of local/national services. Over the years, funding for the Adult Service has been the hardest to secure. We have had to make extensive use of core income to keep it going. For 2010-11, the total cost of the service will be £164,000 (including the salaries of our adult specialists and our National Information and Advice Worker, running costs and management time). We seek as generous donations as possible towards this total (Full details available on request.)

    Solution

    100%
    Categories

  • Health/Wellbeing Health/​Wellbeing
  • Beneficiaries

    • Women & Girls Women & Girls
    • Other Other