This campaign has now closed

Disfigurement can lead to profound emotional and social problems and can be particularly difficult for children and young people. Changing Faces seeks to employ a Training Adviser in Paediatric Health to improve the way the NHS tackles the psycho-social needs of children and young people, an area which the service currently fails to address adequately.

100%
Categories

  • Health/Wellbeing Health/​Wellbeing
  • Beneficiaries

    • Children (3-18) Children (3-18)
    • Young People (18-30) Young People (18-30)

    Situation

    Any child or young person who is born with, or acquires, a ‘different-looking’ face is vulnerable to feelings of being an inferior person without a good chance of success. This perception can be reinforced by the current provision of health care, which tends to focus heavily on surgical and medical interventions to improve appearance. These, although increasingly sophisticated, are limited in their ability to remove a disfigurement entirely. In addition, the vocabulary often used (eg ‘deformity’, ‘defect’, ‘abnormality’) is predominantly negative. Changing Faces believes – and many senior health professionals in the NHS now agree with us – that this approach has been at the expense of a more empowering, child-focused perspective designed to optimise psycho-social adjustment and create ‘disfigurement confidence’. We therefore seek to enable professionals and services to deliver psychological services that complement medical and surgical treatments. What we aim to do is to bring about a systemic change in the knowledge and skills of health and social care professionals, current and future, in primary care and the key medical specialties about the psycho-social aspects of disfigurement and how to address them – based on our experience and the psycho-social research available. To do this, we need to fund and recruit a Training Adviser in Paediatric Health (Children) at a cost of £40,000 per annum (salary and on costs). We seek £120,000 to fund this project over an initial three-year period to help secure its success.

    Solution

    100%
    Categories

  • Health/Wellbeing Health/​Wellbeing
  • Beneficiaries

    • Children (3-18) Children (3-18)
    • Young People (18-30) Young People (18-30)