NERIL (North Essex Resource and Information Line) is part of the 24hour Access to Mental Health Services provision across the whole of the North Essex Mental Health Trust area. It works alongside the Statutory Services to provide a ‘listening ear’ at a time when many of those other services are not available 4pm to 8am, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
In the last year NERIL has continued to grow and in the year April ’05 to March ’06 there were
10,949 calls - a 24% growth overall from the previous year. Although this annual Report/Review does not tend to concentrate on statistics (these are readily available in our Monitoring Reports to our Funders and Commissioners), it is helpful to understand the depth and breadth of need that these figures represent. We usually identify the NERIL service in two parts - Evening NERIL from 4pm to 12am and Night NERIL from 12am to 8am - because Night NERIL was a later development and funded and monitored separately, and this has had a growth rate of 28% in the last year.
Calls are fairly evenly spread across the days but not yet across the areas, with the majority of calls being taken from Mid Essex and North Essex and only 15% from West Essex. West Essex was the most recent area to be served by NERIL and this proportion may well increase over time. 47% of our calls come from ‘Frequent Callers’ - people who used the helpline at least once a week and for at least a month and they agree on a limit of time for their conversations because they understand that others are calling. Although only 2% of calls this year were recorded as actual ‘Crisis Prevention’ or ‘Crisis Intervention’, many callers reporthat talking has prevented them from taking pills or cutting themselves and it is clear that many very needy people find huge support from NERIL.
As one caller put it:….
“NERIL are bloody priceless - an absolute Godsend. I don’t know what we
would do without you all” |
During the Autumn of 2005 and the Spring of 2006, NERIL underwent an Accreditation process to become one of only 50 helplines in the UK who have reached the highest quality standard needed to be a member of the Mental Health Helplines Partnership. This specific body was launched through funding to the Telephone Helplines Association from the Department of Health, to ensure the best possible standards in delivery of mental health service. It involved a huge amount of work on the part of all concerned and refined some of our practice. During this time Maldon Mind changed the telephone system to better support the increasing needs of callers.
