Your Wellbeing is Our Responsibility
iMatter Warrington and North West is a community interest organisation aimed at protecting the most vulnerable members of the community in Warrington and the surrounding areas.
We aim to meet the needs of Black Africans and Ethnic minority groups within the community, providing support and a listening ear.
Promoting public policy changes:
iMatter CIC aims to achieve to promote public policy changes by:
- Providing one to one services and mentoring,
- Risk and need assessments,
- Connecting into existing services like the NHS and developing well-being strategies and training,
- Liaising for stability in the community (medication review, nutrition and lifestyle, financing and budgeting, housing support) etc.
Our Ethics and Values
iMatter is a community based initiative that is guided by a number of ethical principles and values, including:
- Access: Service users should have access to the care they need, when and where they need it.
- Compassion: Services should provide compassionate care for service users, carers, and staff.
- Valuing relationships: The value of relationships between people should be a primary consideration.
- Involvement: Service users and carers should be involved in all aspects of care.
- Autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice: These ethical principles should guide mental health care
- Championing the mental health of Black and Ethnic Minority people and families in Warrington and surrounding areas who may be less likely to access support.
We value each individual, and provide a person-centred support package addressing social isolation and poor access to quality assessments and referrals into NHS services, especially those with no tangible social or informal support.
This service was created out of the need for community-based promotion for positive mental health and well-being. There is also utmost need for the project to support the mental health of young people and helping them not to get to crisis point. This creates a shift from focusing on hospital based environment to community mental health support.
The aim is to reduce the strain on NHS services and provide home based and culturally acceptable support and advocacy.
The focus on the minority community is due to research evidence that some minority ethnic groups in the UK show consistently higher than expected rates of schizophrenia (between 3 and 7 times). Poor mental health especially in black families is arguably one of the greatest challenges facing healthcare at present, as they are more likely to experience mental health crisis than the general public.
- In the year to March 2022, black people were almost 5 times as likely as white people to be detained under the Mental Health Act – 342 detentions for every 100,000 people, compared with 72 for every 100,000 people
- The black ‘other’ ethnic group had the highest rate of detention out of all ethnic groups (760 detentions for every 100,000 people)
- The lowest detention rates were in the white Irish (62 for every 100,000 people), Chinese (64 for every 100,000 people), white British (69 for every 100,000 people) and Indian (75 for every 100,000 people) ethnic groups
- Detention counts for the year to March 2022 are 0.2% higher than those for the previous year
- Women in particular are at greater risk of depression than men for a variety of reasons including prolonged depression, poor integration into work and local community, and poor economic status and domestic violence.
- In a more ethnic diverse communities, majority of women sectioned under the MHA are black. Thus, there is for proactive (than reactive) support by recognizing the cultural and social issues that predispose to poor mental health than reactive support at crisis point.
iMatter Warrington and North West is a community interest organisation aimed at protecting the most vulnerable members of the community in Warrington and the surrounding areas. We aim to meet the needs of Black Africans and Ethnic minority groups within the community, providing support and a listening ear to those in need of support.
Our Partners
We aim to work with stakeholders and mental health advocates within Warrington and beyond, these include the Health and Social care sectors such as the NHS, GP clusters and local authorities.
